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After Post-

Anarchism

duane rousselle

After Post-Anarchism

by Duane Rousselle

After Post-Anarchism
by Duane Roussel le
2012

licensed under creative commons

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commons

Repartee

(an imprint of LBC Books)
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ISBN: 978-1-62049-005-1

For Soren,

who taught me the value of a leap.

“What we are dealing with here is an-
other version of the Lacanian 7/ n'y a
pas de rapport’: if, for Lacan, there is
no sexual relationship, then, for Marx-
ism proper, there is no relationship
between economy and politics, no
meta-language enabling us to grasp
the two levels from the same neutral
standpoint, although— or, rather, be-
cause— these two levels are inextric-
ably intertwined.”

Slavoj Zizek

Afterword 1

The Sacrifice of Knowing 17

The Unstable Framework of Meta-Ethics 37

Post-Anarchism: A Case for

the Centrality of Ethics 119

Toward an Ethics of the Outside 202

Conclusion 255

References

265

Afterword

Children from around the ages of five through
seven are believed to have already acquired an
understanding of the social norms surrounding
sexuality. Immediately following this period of
development, the child separates himself ever
more from the object of his affection. It is by
separating from the object that the child permits
the introduction of a gap between himself and the
affectively charged object. But it is not the gap that
satisfies the child. It is that which fills this gap: a
fantasy of connection. The child knows very well
that the fantasy of connection offers a much safer
encounter with the object than the real connection
itself, he understands that the best way to achieve
a harmonious and sustained encounter with the
object of his affection is to first of all inject the
appropriate distance. The game of separation is
played similarly across the whole domain of human
affairs: separation begets harmony, harmony begets
divorce, and divorce begets the quest for a new
object of affection. The child separates to fantasize
about the object of his affection, the child becomes
dissatisfied with the object which no longer
measures up to his fantasy, and, finally, the child
founds a new object of affection.

When the object of one’s affection is
the mother, and when the father imposes the
injunction ‘No!’, the child wisely accepts the
mediation of language. Better to accept language
than to risk a premature fight-to-the-death with
the father over the mother. There may even be a
heroic act in the child’s injection of this distance.
Let me provide an example: I do not enjoy having
telephone conversations with my grandmother,
and I am certain that she does not enjoy having
telephone conversations with me. I should want
to spare my grandmother’s feelings of guilt for not
wanting to talk on the telephone with me, and I
should do so in such a way that she still does not
have to actually talk with me. After many years of
awkward telephone conversations, I believe that I
have solved our problem: I have stopped making
calls to her. This permits her to blame me, rather
than herself, for not continuing the conversation,
and it relieves her of the need to feel guilt for not
calling me. This is how politics must sometimes
be played. Sometimes sustaining the precious
fantasies of traditional anarchist thought requires
that an anarchist disciple divorce himself from
orthodoxy to usher in a new edifice. The courage
involved in such an act is thus that the ostensibly
sectarian anarchist permits the grandmothers of
anarchist philosophy (whom he otherwise loves

dearly and truly) to blame him for not answering
the call.

We can also describe this process in the lan-
guage of rudimentary set theory. What we learn as
children, and all too quickly forget as adults, is that
conjunctive operations are best followed by exclu-
sive disjunctions and that exclusive disjunctions are
in turn best followed by displacements or the dis-
covery of the previously invisible ‘superset’. Slavoj
Zizek discovers a similar logic in the acceptance of
a new theory:

[Fjirst, [the new theory] is dismissed as
nonsense; then, someone claims that
the new theory, although not without
its merits, ultimately just puts into new
words things already said elsewhere;
finally, the new theory is recognized in
its novelty (Zizek, 2008: 2).

This is the path that critics of post-anarchism
have adopted over the years: first, post-anarchism
was dismissed as obscurantism, non-sensical,
academicism, jargon-laden, and so on; next, Jesse
Cohn & Shawn Wilbur, among others, claimed
that post-anarchism was not without its merits but
ultimately just put into new words what was already
said by the classical anarchists themselves; finally,
post- anarchism is tolerated and both sides have

accepted their loses. The final stage has not been a
divorce of post-anarchism from classical anarchism
in order to usher in a new edifice but precisely the
reverse: there has been a consolidation ormarriage of
the two terms. In other words, it is now obvious that
post- anarchism has passed through two of these
major phases in the development of its theory over
the last three decades. First, post-anarchism was
defined as an attack on the representative ontologies
of classical anarchism. Second, post- anarchism was
defined as a re-reading of the traditional anarchists
to reveal their quintessential post-structuralist
nuances — always avant la lettre. It seems to me
that the second stage has ushered in a marriage
of sorts between traditionalist anarchists and post-
anarchists whereby the two sides have cut their
losses and accepted that (a) anarchism was always
already post- anarchism, and (b) post-anarchism
has itself always been a form of anarchism.

Viewed in this way, we may say that post-an-
archism functioned as a ‘vanishing mediator’ be-
tween an old and a new version of anarchism. Van-
ishing mediators occur between two periods of sta-
sis; as Fredric Jameson has argued, the protestant
work ethic (as ‘vanishing mediator’) allowed for a
transition from feudalism toward capitalism. Simi-
larly, post-anarchism allows for the transition from
a particular framing of anarchism toward another

particular framing of anarchism. Post- anarchism
continues to be used as a description for a particu-
lar type of anarchist project insofar as that project
can not be satisfied by recourse to tradition. In this
case, I am more inclined to describe post- anarchism
as a ‘ displaced mediator’ that can be revived at a
moment’s notice to reconfigure the normal anarch-
ist discourse. After Post-anarchism is an attempt to
latch back onto the displaced mediator and explore
its potential in the emerging stasis of post- anarchist
theory. The new terrain is defined by a certain rec-
onciliation between what currently counts as post-
anarchism, particularly in the Anglophone academic
scene, and what counts as traditional anarchism.
After post-anarchism the marriage and along with it
both sides of the debate are displaced to make room
for something new. I have no pretensions about this
'something new': it will become clear that what I call
new is nothing other than the exposition of a shared
alliance, secret as it may once have been, between
what currently counts as post-anarchism and what
today is understood as ontology.

The coming displacement can be summed up in
the joke about the philosophy professor who recently
got married. The professor was confronted by one
of his students: ‘Professor!, I need to tell you some-
thing immediately!’ The professor paused, looked at
his wife for a moment, and then responded to the

student: ‘Wait a moment, before we go any further I
want to make sure that what you are going to tell me
is worth my time.’ He continued: ‘Will your message
refer to a moment of truth?’ The student replied
without waiting a moment: ‘No, not exactly.’ To
which the professor posed another question: Will
your message refer to something good?’ The student
bit his teeth down onto his bottom lip and then re-
plied: ‘Not at all.’ The professor asked a final ques-
tion: ‘Can your message be put to productive use?’
The student answered, ‘Not immediately; perhaps it
will even be destructive.’ The professor stopped for
a moment to think. Dissatisfied by the student’s re-
sponses and by his own inability to frame what the
student might then want to say to him, he grabbed
his wife by the arm and then marched off into the
university to prepare his next peer-reviewed article.
As the professor walked off he yelled out to the stu-
dent, ‘I do not want to hear any of it!’ This explains
why professors rarely understand the potential of a
revolutionary philosophy. It also explains why the
professor did not know that his student was having
sex with his wife.

Cunning students of traditional philosophy
have been quick to ask: ‘So, what comes after post-
anarchist philosophy?’ The answer, which of course
they already know, comes: ‘It is j» 05 tf-post- anarchist
philosophy!’ This has been the most naive way to

attack post-anarchism. But we ought to take it more
seriously than they do; the laughter we express
over post -post- anarchism might very well be an
expression of our inability to come to terms with
the possibility that post-anarchism might not be
enough. Post-post-anarchism is a joke because it
disembodies us — traditionalists and post-anarchists
alike. It exposes us to the possibility that there
might still be something else out there. The problem
with post- anarchism today is not one of exclusive
disjunction — of either traditional anarchism or
post-anarchism — but precisely their conjunction
or marriage: anarchism and post-anarchism. In
this conjunction we have failed to recognize the
next operation: the discovery of the superset that
displaces the conjunction against an emergent set. In
other words, in the marriage of anarchism and post-
anarchism, we have failed to see that the emerging
students of political philosophy have been fucking
our wives.

This book was written over the course of a
couple months during the summer of 2009. I
have only recently encountered an emergent body
of thought known as speculative realism. It is
now clear to me that speculative realism is grap-
pling with many of the same problems that I have
broached in this book. For the sake of introducing
the problem early, I shall borrow the phraseology of

the object oriented ontologist Levi Bryant: what we
are dealing with in the eventual displacement of the
current marriage is the problem of the hegemony of
epistemology. To put matters even more simply, I
will state immediately that this is the problem that
post-anarchists face in the third decade of the de-
velopment of its theory.

Admittedly, a great deal of what follows stems
from an early and premature attempt to formulate
a response to criticisms of post- anarchism. What I
discovered was that the criticisms of post-anarch-
ism paralleled the informal fallacy outlined by Freud
in his Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.
A neighbour borrows a kettle and returns it dam-
aged. The neighbour constructs three defences: first,
that he returned the kettle undamaged; second,
that it was already damaged when he borrowed it,
and; third, that he never borrowed the kettle in the
first place. These criticisms reflected the very same
concerns that traditional anarchists initially raised
against post-anarchism: they were mostly criticizing
in post-anarchism what post- anarchism was criti-
cizing in classical anarchism, namely the political
strategy of reductionism and/or essentialism. They
argued that: first, post-anarchism represented an at-
tempt to abandon classical or traditional anarchism;
second, post- anarchism represented an attempted
to rescue classical or traditional anarchism from its

own demise, and; third, anarchism was always post-
anarchist. Traditionalists re -signify their rejection of
post- anarchism so that the fantasies grounding the
classical tradition can be sustained. My response to
these critiques inadvertently lead me to a re-reading
of post- anarchism that took its critics' claims more
seriously than they may have intended them to be
read. If there were critics of post- anarchism on the
side of traditional anarchism then there ought to be
critics of post- anarchism on the side of -post-
anarchism too.

For two decades post-anarchism has adopted
an epistemological point of departure for its critique
of the representative ontologies of classical anarch-
ism. This critique focused on the classical anarchist
conceptualization of power as a unitary phenomen-
on that operated uni directionally to repress an other-
wise creative and benign human essence. Andrew
Koch may have inaugurated this trend in the early
1990s when he wrote his widely influential paper
“Post- structuralism and the Epistemological Basis of
Anarchism.” Koch’s paper certainly laid some of the
important groundwork for post-anarchism’s contin-
ual subsumption of ontology beneath the a -priori of
an epistemological ohentation. His work continues
to be cited as an early and important venture into
post-anarchist political philosophy. The problem is
that Koch could not conceive of an anti-essentialist

and autonomous ontological system, one not subject
to regulation or representation by the human mind.
Consequently, he was forced to assert a subjectiv-
ist claims-making ego as the foundation of a post-
structuralist anarchist politics.

Saul Newman was indebted to this heritage
insofar as he also posited the ego (extrapolated
from the writings of Max Stimer) and the subject
(extrapolated from Jacques Lacan’s oeuvre) as the
paradoxical ‘outside’ to power and representation.
Todd May fell into a similar trap in his book The
Political Philosophy of Post-structuralist Anarch-
ism when he wrote that “[mjetaphysics [...] partakes
of the normativity inhabiting the epistemology that
provides its foundations” (May, 1997: 2). New-
man’s approach did not necessarily foreclose the
possibility of a metaphysics, at least to the extent
that he began with the subject of the Lacanian trad-
ition (wherein the subject is believed to be radically
barred from das Ding). On the other hand, May
completely foreclosed the possibility of any escape
from the reign of the epistemological. There laid the
impasse of yesterday’s post- anarchism. This im-
passe at the heart of the project of post-anarchism
has forced Koch, Newman, May, and many others,
to come to similar conclusions about the place of
ontology in post-anarchist theory. The post-anarch-
ists have all formulated a response strikingly similar

to Koch’s argument that any representative ontol-
ogy ought to be dismantled and dethroned in favour
of “a conceptualization of knowledge that is contin-
gent on a plurality of internally consistent episteme ”
(Koch, 2011: 27).

As a point of connection, Walter Benjamin was
known to have failed to defend his Habilitations-
schrift on the Origin of the German Mourning-Play
for his PhD examination. Having failed the exam as
best he could, the study nonetheless became widely
published and influential. For my own PhD examina-
tion I also felt destined for failure: I was to defend
a written examination on Walter Benjamin’s Berlin
Childhood that demonstrated my ability to parrot in-
formation back to my examiners. I thought it much
better to fail the exam as best I could than to succeed
through the worst possible circumstances. But here
I maintain that post-anarchism had to fail in order
for it to have been effective. If post- anarchism had
not provided its naive reductive account of the clas-
sical anarchist tradition, it would not have been able
to make enough enemies to separate itself as a sect
and as a theory of the new. To put it another way: it
is only after the failure of the fundamental fantasy
that the traversal of the fantasy can occur. Or, to re-
phrase an old Shakespearean cliche, why is it better
to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all?
Precisely because in the most successful failure of

love, one is able to pass on to the crucial next stage
of learning from one’s mistakes. The post-anarch-
ists needed to begin by sketching out a naive critique
of the ontological essentialism of some monolithic
'classical' anarchist tradition — I claim that we can fail
much better.

An old joke reads: a lecturer asked his student:
‘What, since every answer of yours is wrong, do
you expect to be when you grow up?’ The student
responded: ‘I expect to be a TV weather forecaster
after graduation!’ Today the traditional and post-
anarchists might ask us: ‘what, since every answer
to the question of ontology has been wrong, do you
expect to do after post-anarchism?’ As good post-
anarchists we ought to answer our interlocutors as
follows: ‘I expect to be a speculative philosopher
after the coming displacement!’ This is precisely
the problem that we are up against: by dismissing
all ontologies as suspiciously representative and
as incessantly harbouring a dangerous form of
essentialism, post-anarchists have overlooked the
privilege that they have placed on the human subject,
language, and discourse. Here, the ontological
question is itself elided into the epistemological
register. The epistemological characterization of post-
anarchism has held sway for far too long. Perhaps it is
time to revive the roots of post-anarchism — after all,
Hakim Bey’s ‘post-anarchism anarchy’ was itself an

ontological philosophy.

Ontology must now be distinguished from
representation. The correlation between thinking
and being, between mind and thing, is only one of
the possible ways of theorizing about meta-ethics.
One may also consider the mutual exclusivity of
thought and being, mind and thing, insofar as the
one is progressively lost as the other is progressively
gained. We must shift the terms of the debate and
interrogate the hegemony that epistemology has
been afforded within post- anarchist philosophy. At
least two possibilities are now permitted. On the one
hand, we could intervene into the reigning mode of
philosophy, namely epistemology, by latching onto
concepts from meta- ethical philosophy. Meta-ethics
allows one to easily separate the ontological from the
epistemological and to answer very particular ques-
tions about each in order to formulate an overarch-
ing meta-ethical position. What meta-ethics does
through an analytical gesture we might do through a
critical gesture. Retroactively, I shall insist that this
was what I attempted to do with this book. Post-
anarchism is particularly adept at this task because
of its resounding ability to frame itself as an ethical
political philosophy as against the strategic political
philosophy of classical Marxism. On the other hand,
the best way to defeat the privilege of epistemologic-
al anarchism is to shift the terms of the debate — this

is also something that post- anarchists have already
proved themselves quite good at doing. Instead of
ashing the question ‘how do representative onto-
logical systems harbour concealed epistemological
orientations toward the political?’, one might ash,
‘ do epistemological orientations toward the political
always harbour representative and subject- centred
ontological systems?’

The fallacy of strategic political philosophy in
the Marxist tradition is, as Todd May quite correctly
points out, that it remains committed to a concept
of power that is unitary in its analysis, unidirectional
in its influence, and utterly repressive in its effect.
Similarly, Levi Bryant’s ontology allows one to argue
that there is a fallacy that occurs “whenever one
type of entity is treated as the ground or explains
all other entities” (italics in original). Whereas
May’s post-structuralist anarchism moved away
from the fallacy of the unitary analysis of power
(whereby subjects are constituted by the influence
of a single site of power), it nonetheless remained
committed to a tactical political philosophy that
is monarchical in the final analysis. It remains
monarchical to the extent that the human world,
the world of epistemology, is treated as the yardstick
of democracy, and no room is afforded for the
things of the world to influence politics. Bryant’s
argument is quite instructive: “[wjhat we thus get

is not a democracy of objects or actants where all
objects are on equal ontological footing [...] but
instead a monarchy of the human in relation to all
other beings” (italics in original). The real fallacy
is thus not against strategic political philosophy
but philosophy itself and the way it has played out
over so many centuries. “The epistemic fallacy,”
writes Bryant, “consists in the thesis that proper
ontological questions can be fully transposed into
epistemological questions.”

We can now distinguish three stages in the
life of post-anarchism. First, we can deduce what
Siireyyya Evren has described as its introductory
period. The introductory period of post-anarchism
is defined by its inability to side-step the ontological
problem in the literature of classical anarchism.
During this period, post-anarchism needed to
distinguish itself from classical anarchism while
nonetheless remaining committed to its ethical
project. The second period overcomes the problem
of the separation of post- anarchism from classical
anarchism by re-reading the classical tradition as
essentially post-anarchistic. Some of the critiques
of post-anarchism are included into this period
insofar as post-anarchism, for them, was always
already anarchism. Whereas the first and second
phases included only explicitly anarchist literature
under their rubric of worthwhile investigation, in the

third period this no longer holds true. To be certain,
the second period permitted the incorporation of
post-structuralist literature into post-anarchist
discussions, but always with a certain amount of
reservation. The third period, the one that is to
come — the one that is already here if only we would
heed its call — will not take such care with attempts
at identification or canonization. An after to post-
anarchism is no joke, it is already here, like a seed
beneath the snow, waiting to be discovered.

The Sacrifice of Knowing

Held at gun-point by a mugger, you have one
of two choices: your money oryourlife. The obvious
twist is that if you depart from your life you would
also by consequence depart from your money. This
choice that is not a choice describes perfectly the
dilemma of subjectivity: your knowledge or your
being. If you depart from your being you also by
consequence depart from your knowing. Why must
political philosophy begin with the subject who
incessantly thinks himself into existence when we
know very well that this is the choice that we make
to preserve our life? In order to retain some sense
of being we are forced into the choice of knowledge
and thus, as a consequence, we lose some of our
existence in the process. Rephrasing our choice:
either I am not thinking or I am not being. The
forced choice is the basis of subjectivity insofar
as one can never step outside of epistemology
without being reduced to a thing in the real. It is the
forced choice of epistemology over ontology that
post- anarchism must overcome. To be sure, this
is a difficult task — one that requires a paradoxical
solution. A traversal of the fantasy of knowing our
being thus requires that one take responsibility for
the being or thing that works upon our knowledge.
Post-anarchism and traditional anarchism have

a long distance to travel to traverse the fantasy of
choice. Let us hazard a beginning.

Post-anarchism has been of considerable im-
portance in the discussions of radical intellectuals
across the globe over the last decade. In its most
popular form, it demonstrates a desire to blend
the most promising aspects of traditional anarch-
ist theory (particularly, its ethical a -priori) with de-
velopments in post-structuralist and post-modem
thought. Post-anarchists have hitherto relied on
post- structuralist critiques of ontological essential-
ism in order to situate their discourse in relation to
the traditional anarchist discourse. My argument is
that (post)anarchist ethics requires the elaboration of
another important line of critique against epistemo-
logical foundationalism. To accomplish this task, I
turn to the philosophy of Georges Bataille. Bataille’s
philosophy allows for new ways of conceiving post-
anarchist ethics that are not predicated upon essen-
tialist categories, foundationalist truth-claims, or the
agency of the subject in the political context.

If I am to make the case for post-anarchist
ethics, I must first of all provide the reader with
the conceptual framework upon which this essay
has been constructed. As such, what follows is the
result of an attempt at formulating a response to
this task which has been set before me. The astute
reader will take notice that there are a few incongru-

ities relating to the classification systems developed
herein, but these classificatory issues should not in
the end distract the reader from the overall point
being made. It is not for the purpose of utility or
for the gratification of constructing or defending a
sound theory of the subject in society that I develop
these foundations but rather, and precisely, for the
purpose of demonstrating the problem set before
me. It is the problem of all positive conceptions of
foundation and system — in a word, I am speaking
about the problem of essence — and the relationship
of each of these conceptions to a curious body of
thought, anarchism, that I wish to explore. Foun-
dations harbour the full range of possibilities inher-
ent to the questions posed by ontological philoso-
phy, and, similarly, systems harbour the full range
of possibilities inherent to the questions posed by
epistemological philosophy. Foundations and sys-
tems are always fraught with disastrous instability
and this thereby necessitates philosophers to pro-
duce elaborations on the accidental (what I also call
negative elaborations) as well as the essential (what
I also call positive elaborations).

For the purposes of this essay, essence and ac-
cident should be understood as attributes founded
within the inextricable connection between issues
concerning ontological and epistemological phil-
osophy and within the overarching study of meta-

ethics. The relationship within and between these
two domains is also constitutive of the subject. The
within relationship describes positive and nega-
tive attributes of the corresponding domain. For
example, we may begin from an essential under-
standing of being or else we may begin from an
accidental understanding of being as non-being.
Likewise, we may begin from an essential under-
standing of knowing or else we may begin from an
accidental understanding of knowing as non-know-
ing. The between relationship describes two matri-
ces: on the one band, there is a constitutive rela-
tionship between epistemological and ontological
claims that describes the being who thinks herself
into existence (an essential discourse), and, on the
other hand, there is the non-being whose exist-
ence becomes acquired through reductions in use-
ful thought (an accidental discourse). I must now
bring these two contingent relationships to point:
my assumption is that essentialism is a meta-eth-
ical position, it is perhaps £Aemeta- ethical position
that has most come under attack from radical phil-
osophers in the contemporary period. As a point of
example, I put my tickets in a hat and drew Sartre’s
name: Sartre argued that the two domains (being
and knowing) are as far apart as the poles, u [t]he
essence is not in the object; itis the meaning of the
object [...] The object does not refer to being as to

a signification; it would be impossible, for example,
to define being as a presence since absence too dis-
closes being, since not to be there means still to be”
(italics in original; Sartre, [1943] 1993: 8). Sartre’s
provocation was an elaboration of this full range of
attributes inherent to the meta-ethics — it is just as
likely that the object’s absence (or accidental fea-
tures) discloses a truth as does its presence (or es-
sential features). In this way, we may also speak of
the subject through the full range of attributes. We
may do this under the assumption that the sub-
ject is nothing but this object among objects, thing
among things, who pretends at being something far
superior to these things. The subject is thus this in-
ability to consolidate its truth with its being a thing.

It is in this regard, I set before me the task of
rewriting the foundation of traditional anarchist
conceptions of being; a task that will, as a necessity,
remain an unfinished failure. The problem of
successfully finalizing this project is also the problem
of creating a knowledgeable account of being. Who
among us has not had the opportunity to solve the
Chinese finger trap? If you try too hard to get yourself
out of the trap you end up even further trapped. The
task is a delicate one and must be likened to the
oft-cited aphorism on the delicacy of relationships:
‘relationships are a bit like holding sand in the grip
of your hand: if you grip it too tight, the sand trickles

out — but hold the sand loosely, and it remains in
place.’ The paradox is thus that, as Sartre has put it,
“ [b]y not consi dering being [...] as an appearance which
can be determined in concepts, we have understood
first of all that knowledge can not by itself give an
account of being” (Sartre, [1943] 1993: 9). Perhaps
we must begin to approach the truth of the being of
the subject with the same delicacy that one solves the
problem of the Chinese finger trap.

The success of this project would invite the
appearance of the essential subject and foreclose
the subject as constitutive of an absence as well.
Be this as it may, in writing about the absence
I nonetheless construct an appearance in place
of it which occurs as a betrayal of the source. In
constructing a framework of knowledge about the
anarchist subject I only move further away from
that which I seek to describe. As we shall see, there
is a lineage of philosophers in the continental
tradition whose ideas have converged on this point.
For now it will be enough to claim that in the texts
of prominent classical philosophers, the study of
ontology and epistemology often went hand in hand
as two parts of the same enterprise (cf., Silverman,
2008). And, in the development of a meta-ethical
framework, so shall it here. Meta-ethics occurs quite
fundamentally at the intersection of epistemological
and ontological philosophy. (Is this not the same

intersection that occurs between Marxism and
Anarchism, Economy and State, and so on?)

Unbeknownst to the reader until now: I write
this in direct opposition to my overall intention. I
write this while shamefaced. In writing about this
topic — the subject of anarchist philosophy amidst
the recent development of a system of ideas in post-
anarchist political philosophy — I remain trapped
within the world of useful knowledge. For Georges
Bataille, all knowledge or positive epistemological
systems operate within the restrictive economies
of utility (Goldhammer, 2005: 154): “[t]he small-
est activity, or the least project puts an end to the
game [...] and I am [...] brought back into the prison
of useful objects, loaded with meaning” (Bataille,
2001: 98). The problem of writing the knowledge
of being, as with the problem of the least project, is
the problem of the erasure of the accidental by the
appearance of the essence. And yet is this not also
the very problem of being: to speak of the freedom
of non-knowledge from the position of the knowing
subject? Inevitably, there is a certain passion in this
slavery to knowledge, a certain joyful sacrifice of
being of which Georges Bataille was keenly aware:
“Living in order to be able to die, suffering to enjoy,
enjoying to suffer, speaking to say nothing [...] the
passion for not knowing” (Bataille, 2001: 196).
Like Bataille’s oeuvre, my work springs out of great

reluctance and mental anguish, and yet it does not
as a consequence dispense with the enjoyment of
writing or with the enjoyment of sacrifice. One can
sacrifice a great many things in life but in doing so
one does not sacrifice the experience of the sacred.
On the contrary, it is through sacrifice that one is
able to engage in this experience and to thereby
celebrate ethical life. According to Bataille, sacrifice
of oneself brings the subject into view as an ethical
agent. Sacrifice was Bataille’s answer to the eth-
ical problem of meta-ethical nihilism; whereby we
understand that there are ethics of the first order
and there are meta- ethics or ethics of the second
order. One may describe a nihilist meta-ethical pos-
ition but this does not mean that one ceases to act
positively in the world. It means, contrarily, that
one shall be willing to sacrifice oneself to the posi-
tive. It means that she understands that the positive
springs forth from within the domain of the nega-
tive. It means that ethical acts are never coded into
the commandments of the symbolic order, or lan-
guage. I shall speak to this point in more detail in
the sections that follow.

If the reader takes no interest in this text then
I can say that I have at the very least grounded my
intellectual affairs on the achievement of a sense of
mastery over these foundations and systems — those
desires first working forth from within this text and

then radiating outward (conceptual sys-tems, de-
notative, descriptive and prescriptive pro -positions,
and so on) but also those passions of the univer-
sity that first work forth from without the text and
then burrow their way inside of it (the thirst for
knowledge , 1 competing ideological interests, and so
on) — that have inhabited my desires and ostensibly
inhibited my creative capacities. The truly astute
reader should therefore take notice that the classifi-
cation systems that I have constructed are as faulty
as the positive foundations and systems of countless
other philosophies, and the governments upon which
they are built, as well as, as it were, the great tradition
upon which I have erected my black flag; all of the
great foundations and systems are destined to failure.
The desire of the university is to make the subject
contribute to the system of useful knowledge and
this outlines those foreign desires that Jacques Lacan
named University Discourse. Bruce Fink eloquently
described what is at issue in University Discourse:
“knowledge replaces the nonsensical master signifier
in the dominant, commanding position [...] system-
atic knowledge is the ultimate authority, reigning in
the stead of blind will, and everything has its reason

1 For example, it is the foremost duty of the sociology graduate student

at the University of New Brunswick to make “an original contribution to
knowledge” (University of New Brunswick, 2010: 5).

[...] the university discourse providing a sort of legit-
imation of rationalization of the master’s will” (Fink,
1995: 132). Having not realized the benefit of con-
tributing to what Bataille has called the unfinished
system of non-knowledge (cf., Bataille, 2001), the
subject of University Discourse suffers by tirelessly
producing useful knowledge for the academy, 2 she
thereby alienates herself from the product of her
wasted efforts: “[t]he product or loss here is the div-
ided, alienated subject. Since the agent in the univer-
sity discourse is the knowing subject, the unknowing
subject or subject of the unconscious is produced,
but at the same time excluded” (Fink, 1995: 132).
Thus, the mastery that I have obtained always also
comes at the price of losing myself to the passions of
self -negation through sacrifice. It is therefore with a
sense of irony that I insist at the outset that this es-
say is for those of us whose hearts continue to be set
ablaze by the fiery desires that endlessly consume us.

2 The question may be raised as to what extent the development of
a non-system of non-knowledge, a radical system, within the academy
itself succumbs to the discourse of the university. Zizek has argued
that “one should always bear in mind that, for Lacan, [the] university
discourse is not directly linked to the university as a social institution
[...] Consequently, not only does the fact of being turned into an object
of the university interpretive machinery prove nothing about ones
discursive status — names like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, or Benjamin, all
three great anti-universitarians whose presence in the academy today
[is] all pervasive — demonstrate that the excluded or damned authors are
the ideal feeding stuff for the academic machine” (Zizek, 1997).

My contribution does take on the appearance
of utility. My aim in this thesis is to demonstrate the
compatibility of post-anarchism with the latent eth-
ical project of traditional anarchist philosophy while
advancing still beyond this threshold by bringing
post- anarchism into contact with another outside
force, the irrecuperable work of Georges Bataille. In
doing so, I plan to use this detour to locate tradition-
al anarchism’s dormant core, its innermost ethical
kernel. I believe that the proper ethical attitude here
is not to retreat from University Discourse and all of
its problems, nor is it to disavow its problems, but
rather it is to speak through University Discourse
properly. Apropos of this thesis I am reminded of
an infamous joke about a study on the function
of the head of the penis. Three results came from
the study. First, after one year of research and over
two-hundred thousand dollars spent, Duke Univer-
sity found that the head of the penis is much larger
than the shaft because it provides more pleasure for
the man. Stanford University later concluded, after
three years of study, and over two-hundred and fifty
thousand dollars, that the function of the head was
to provide more pleasure to the other during sexual
intercourse. Finally, the University of Wisconsin, a
more honest university, spent thirteen dollars and
found that the function of the head of the penis is to
keep the man’s hand from slipping off of the shaft

during masturbation. Here we have three responses
to University Discourse: a selfish enjoyment, a self-
less enjoyment, and a response that has nothing to
do with enjoyment at all. The final response sabo-
tages the university discourse from within. It is not
for the satisfaction of myself that I write this essay.
This would be a naive assumption because it pre-
tends that the desire of the university does not speak
through me. Second, I ought not to maintain openly
that I write this for the other, for the university, be-
cause that would only be an admission of privilege
and just as naive as the first response. In claiming
that I am a product of the university, a product of
privilege, I erase my capacity to make any claim un-
tarnished by the academy. Rather, I must take re-
sponsibility for my writing as university discourse by
using this research to keep my hand from flying off
of my shaft as I masturbate wildly — the university
provides me with the best possible location from
which to mount my study, it structures my desire
for which I take complete responsibility.

It is my hope that this j oumey will bring about a
renewed interest and understanding in the negative
foundation and system of the tradition that guides
all of my writing. My aim in pursuing this line of in-
quiry is to elucidate the nihilist core (from the latin
nihil meaning nothing or no-thing) that has here-
tofore animated fragments of the anarchist tradition.

This is its accidental core which, as with the sub-
ject in Stimerian or Lacanian philosophy, has been
its distinctive but largely unrealized ontology. Thus,
there are, as it were, two anarchist traditions that
have unfolded in tandem. On the one hand, there is
the manifestation of a tradition that opposes what
Bataille enthusiasts have described as restrictive
states (ie, nation-states) and restrictive economies
(global capitalism); however, in this manifest trad-
ition, states and economies are limited to a positive
interpretation: state refers to a sovereign political
foundation and embodies a set of commandments
or laws, and economy refers to a system of exchange
and the valuation of this exchange within and be-
tween labourers (as in classical Marxian economies).
On the other hand, there is the irrecuperable force
that answers negatively to questions concerning
ontological and epistemological philosophy and de-
scribes the base states and economies that provide
substance to their restrictive counterparts. Readers
acquainted with Hakim Bey’s ‘ontological anarch-
ism’ (cf, Bey, 1993) will be familiar with what it is
that I am suggesting. Bey defined ‘ontological an-
archism’ as the philosophy of a general force — Ba-
taille likewise produced a philosophy of the general
economy — which is always founded onno-thing:

As we meditate on the nothing we

notice that although it cannot be de-

fined, nevertheless paradoxically we
can say something about it (even if
only metaphorically): it appears to be
a ‘chaos’ [...] chaos lies at the heart of
our project. [...] chaos-as-excess, the
generous outpouring of nothing into
something. [...] Anarchists have been
claiming for years that ‘anarchy is
not chaos.’ Even anarchism seems to
want a natural law, an inner and in-
nate morality in matter, an entelechy,
or purpose -of-being (Bey, 1993).

The general state is quite simply no-thing.
It becomes obvious that although the general
state can not be de-fined, nevertheless I can say
something about it. What I can say is that it does
not occur within a restrictive apparatus of language
and knowledge. It is ostensibly captured by these
restrictive apparatuses, but in actuality it is not at all
captured. It passes like lightning through metaphor.

Post-anarchism has also occurred like a flash
of lightning. I shall argue that post- anarchism has
commonly been associated with one of two trends
over the last two decades. First, and most popularly,
it has referred to the extension of traditional
anarchist philosophy by way of interventions

into and from post-structuralism and/or post-
modern philosophy. Second, and most prevalent
in the non-Anglophone world, post-anarchism
has been understood as an attempt to explore
new connections between traditional anarchist
philosophy and non-anarchist radical philosophy
without thereby reducing these explorations to
developments from any particular philosophical
group. In this regard, Anton Fernandez de Rota has
described post-anarchism as:

[bjeing in-between, with one foot in
the dying world and the other in the
world that is coming. It should not
be understood as a mere conjunction
of anarchism plus post-structuralism
alone, no matter how much it drinks
from both foundations. Rather, it is a
flag around which to express the de-
sire to transcend the old casts (Anton
Fernandez de Rota as cited in Rous-
selle &Evren, 2011: 147).

My belief is that post- anarchism, as a discursive
strategy that has gone to great lengths to rethink
traditional anarchism from outside of its narrow
confines in political economy (or any restrictive
philosophy) and canonical thinkers (ie, Proudhon,
Bakunin, Kropotkin), has provided a moment in

which to reflect on anarchism’s unique place in an
assemblage of competing political language games.
Post-anarchism is the realization of traditional
anarchist meta-ethics, it is anarchist meta-ethics,
but it is an incomplete project insofar as it has
focused only on the epistemological dimension of
meta- ethics.

I argue that meta-ethics is predicated upon
the relationship between answers to questions
of ontological and epistemological philosophy.
Moreover, I argue that the dominant position within
contemporary meta-ethics is avowedly nihilist and
that this nihilism finds its political equivalent in
traditional anarchist philosophy. Given this, there
are reasons to believe that contemporary meta-
ethical philosophers might benefit from readings
in traditional anarchist philosophy, and there are
reasons to believe that anarchist philosophers might
benefit from readings in meta- ethics. Two variants of
nihilism appear within the literature: one that retains
the subject as a metaphysical possibility and one that
rejects the subject as an inadequate framework for
conceiving the base reality of anarchy. In this sense,
it makes little difference whether one adopts ethical
universalism or ethical relativism because each
position appears to be a conflation of the centralissues
of the ethics of base reality. The crucial distinction
is whether or not this base reality is best conceived

from within the confines of the metaphysical subject.
While I aim to provide the case that we ought to
think politics outside of the metaphysical subject, I
ultimately remain undecided on this choice. Instead, I
trace two meta-ethical pathways for the reader: what
I call (1) base subjectivism, and (2) base materialism.
I argue that the base subjectivist response to meta-
ethics is easily conceived through a latent reading
of the anarchist tradition and that to take this
negation of conventional ethics to the end requires
an intervention from the work of Georges Bataille.

Next, I situate post-anarchism as a unique pol-
itical discourse that occurs among an assemblage of
other (often contradictory) political discourses in or-
der to introduce the meta-ethics upon which it has
been grounded. I claim that post-anarchism is at
once the outgrowth of ‘new anarchism’ and yet also
its limit. For this reason post- anarchism can not be
reduced to the problems associated with its introduc-
tory phase, including, for example, the problem of
the reduction of classical anarchism. Instead, post-
anarchism occurs as the realization of the latent
meta-ethical discourse that has always been buried
beneath manifest traditional anarchist philosophy.
Post-anarchism is what is in anarchism more than
anarchism. Post- anarchism offers traditional an-
archism the opportunity to finally make a beginning
at failure. In this regard, it appears as though Petr

Kropotkin’s ethical philosophy has heretofore pro-
vided the point-de-capiton of traditional anarchist
ethics and so it should prove worthy to reread Kro-
potkin’s ethical system from the standpoint of post-
anarchist though. As we shall see, it is possible to
move beyond Kropotkin’s naturalist/humanist eth-
ics by either rejecting it entirely or else founding a
post-Kropotkinian terrain upon which to rebuild the
traditional discourse. This latter strategy involves
carefully selecting which segments of the Kropot-
kinian discourse to highlight against other (contra-
dictory) segments. I also revisit two strange anarchist
meta-ethical systems, virtue ethics and utilitarian-
ism, to arrive at an elaboration of the main trends in
post- anarchist political philosophy.

Finally, I explore Bataille’s base material-
ist meta-ethics. I argue that Bataille’s meta-ethics
answered negatively to the questions of ontological
and epistemological philosophy and thereby brought
the anti-authoritarian ethic to its fullest realization.
Thus, Bataille’s philosophy exposed an underside to
the foundation and system of conventional political
and social philosophy: he described a foundation
fraught with instability and a system that aimed only
toward failure. He exposed the negative dimension
of all philosophical works (and the concrete social
practices and institutions founded upon them) as in-
herently unstable and predicated upon a fundamen-

tal failure. He further highlighted the methodology
that guides this thesis which is best summarized by
the following passage: “You must know, first of all,
that everything that has a manifest side also has a
hidden side. Your face is quite noble, there’s a truth
in your eyes with which you grasp the world, but
your hairy parts underneath your dress are no less a
truth than your mouth is” (Bataille, 1997). It is this
latent truth that hides forever beneath the fabric of
concrete socio-political existence (and also beneath
the apparent discourses interpreted by hermeneut-
ics) that provides the impetus for manifest socio-
political engagement. It is therefore a misreading of
Bataille to focus on that which was intended merely
as a metaphor of the Real (ie the potlatch, the gift,
and so on). For Bataille, metaphor is the fabric that
reveals base reality but it occurs only through the
act and not as a consequence of its concrete mani-
festation. Benjamin Noys argued that “ The Accursed
Share [and other texts written by Bataille are] at
[their] most disappointing in [their] concrete political
proposals” (Noys, 2000: 1 13). I argue that to miss
this latent reading, expressed in various ways also
within the manifest content of Bataille’s own writing,
is to miss the crucial opportunity of the latent read-
ing of the anarchist tradition. It is to further hinder
the reader’s ability to conceive of that unique state
of individual freedom that Bataille has referred to as

sovereignty. “Sovereignty is NOTHING” (Bataille,
1993: 256). Noys writes:

The movement onward would be the
movement of sovereignty as NOTH-
ING, and of sovereignty as that which
refuses to settle within subjectivity [...]
but while sovereignty is NOTHING it is
also a ‘nothing’ that displaces the philo-
sophical model of the subject [...] sover-
eignty is NOTHING, a nothing that is
a slipping away of the subject [...] it re-
veals the unstable status of the subject
(Noys, 2000: 74-5).

Sovereignty, as the subjectivity of no-thing,
is the release of the subject from the chains of
knowing: it is the sacrifice of knowing.

The Unstable Framework
of Meta-Ethics

There can be said to exist two orders of ethics:
those of the first order (normative ethics) and those
of the second order (meta-ethics). It will prove
important to distinguish between these orders.
On this topic John Mackie, the oft- quoted moral
skeptic, has provided what is perhaps the most lucid
explanation: “In our ordinary experience we first
encounter first order statements about particular
actions; in discussing these, we may go on to frame,
or dispute, more general first order principles; and
only after that are we likely to reflect on second order
issues” (Mackie, 1977: 9). We may say that ethics
of the second order, while not entirely divorced from
first order ethics, are defined by the development of
a self-referential analysis of normativity. As Mackie
has put it:

One could be a second order moral sceptic
without being a first order one, or again
the other way around. A man could hold
strong moral views, and indeed ones
whose content was thoroughly conven-
tional, while believing that they were sim-
ply attitudes and policies with regard to

conduct that he and other people held.
Conversely, a man could reject all estab-
lished morality while believing it to be an
objective truth that it was evil or corrupt
(Mackie, 1977: 16).

Relatedly, Burgess has argued that “[tjhere is
no reason why anethicists [moral skeptics] should
not have personal ideals and standards without the
intellectual baggage of moral belief that usually ac-
companies them” (Burgess, 2007: 437). In this
sense we may say, for example, that one might hold
the meta-ethical position of nihilism and yet none-
theless fall inline with manifest traditional anarchist
normativity. Meta- ethics is the study of the latent
ethical dimension inherent to any philosophical dis-
course as well as the philosophical investigation of
ethical discourse itself. The curious status of ethics
of the second order, as opposed to normative eth-
ics, has been that nihilist responses to meta-ethical
questions have been commonplace but this nihilism
has been veiled from the wider public — and, more
narrowly, it has been veiled from radical social and
political theorists — by an insular jargon. In this re-
gard, Allen Wood has argued that “the questions
raised by twentieth- century meta-ethics have ap-
parently been radical, and the dominant position
was even openly nihilist” (Wood, 1996: 221).

the unstable framework

Wood continued by arguing that the meta-ethic-
al views of this later period have been “radical in
that they [have] attempted to some degree directly
to undermine our commitment to all moral values
or to the moral point of view generally, typically by
showing that such commitment is based on illu-
sions about morality, regarded as psychological or
social phenomenon” (Wood, 1996: 223). I shall
for the purposes of this essay assume that Wood’s
thesis is conect. It shall be my purpose to elaborate
the status of these ethics in a sufficient way so as to
build a foundation and system capable of describ-
ing the meta- ethics of anarchism as the preoccupa-
tion of contemporary meta-ethical discourse. In this
sense, post- anarchism shall be conceived provision-
ally as the meta-ethics of anarchist political philoso-
phy rather than more narrowly as ‘anarchism plus
post-structuralism.’ Post-anarchism, as a contem-
porary meta-ethical discourse, elucidates the ethical
discourse that hides at the core of traditional an-
archist philosophy.

The Problem of Place and
Ontological Essentialism

There have been two prominent areas of study
within meta-ethical philosophy, the description of the
relationship between each will prove important in de-

scribing the negative foundation and system of post-
anarchist meta-ethics. Allen Wood has expanded
this concentration into a tripartite system: a meta-
physical investigation into the nature of moral facts
and properties, a semantic inquiry into the meaning
of moral assertions, and an epistemological account
of the nature of moral knowledge (cf., Wood, 1996:
221). For the purposes of this essay I have collapsed
elements of the semantic inquiry into the epistemo-
logical account. In this sense, truth-claims are posi-
tive propositions intended to be taken as the good
and they can be distinguished from the philosophical
preoccupations with the actual meaning or inten-
tions of the claim (whereby, for example, academ-
ics squabble over the meaning of the word ‘ought’ or
‘must’ in varying statements; cf., Silk, 2010).

The first area of meta- ethics has traditionally
concerned the place from which ethical principles are
said to emanate. From the mid-thirteenth century
place was understood as any dimension of defined
or indefinite extent. According to this understanding,
place occupies the ontological spectrum of meta-
ethical questioning and deals with issues concerning
the nature and origin of ethical acts (ie, the ‘what?’
and ‘where?’ questions that have prompted the
development of ethical substantialisms). Central to
the preoccupation on place has been the lingering
question about the social situatedness of the subject

the unstable framework

and the role of this context in the development of
the subject’s ethics; 3 in this regard, ethics remains
hinged to the never-ending debates surrounding
structure and agency, free-will and determinism, and
so on. Three substantial theories have responded to
the question of place: (1) ethical universalism, (2)
ethical relativism, and (3) ethical nihilism.

Adherents of ethical universalism have posited
that there is a shared objective essence that grounds
all normative principles irrespective of the stated
values of independently situated subjects or social
groups. Many times, this essence has arrived as
a consequence of the a 'priori assumption of a
static and/or natural human nature. It should not
go unnoticed that Todd May’s post-structuralist
anarchist critique of classical anarchism constitutes
a gross reduction of the classical anarchist response
to the question of place. However, his critique does
serve as a useful example of a strong tendency within
traditional anarchist discourse toward humanist
naturalism:

we can recognize that anarchism’s nat-
uralist view of human beings plays an

ethical role in its political theory [...]

3 To provide one preliminary example: this has been the problem of
place in theories from the Frankfurt school of Marxism, as Todd May has
argued: “The problem is that if all of capitalist society has been co-opted,
then there is no place from which critique [or, indeed, ethics] could arise”
(May, 1994: 125).

Moreover, the naturalist justification al-
lows anarchists to assume their ethics
rather than having to argue for them.

If the human essence is already benign,
then there is no need to articulate what
kinds of human activity are good and
what kinds are bad (May, 1994: 64).

I shall soon return to this point. Essence has
also arrived as a consequence of the presumed
shared general conditions of a select universal social
group relative to another universal social group as
products of the unfolding of the telos of history
(as in some readings of Marx), and/or tireless
appropriations of traditional conceptions of morality,
rationality, reason, and justice. In the latter case we
might take Karl-Otto Apel’s and Jurgen Habermas’s
discourse ethics as our example (in this regard, cf.,
Johri, 1996). My argument, in this respect, against
discourse ethics is very similar to Todd May’s in The
Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism
(cf., 1994: 125-6) solwon’t bother to recast it here.
Instead, I would like the reader to notice the nuance
employed when describing foundation and system
as opposed to life-world and system. May’s latent
description of Habermas’s ethical space, the life-
world, follows: “[t]he assumption of the ideal speech
situation [as the foundation of the life-world] is part

the unstable framework

of Habermas’s attempt to wrest a critical space from
capitalist co-optation” (ibid., 126; see also pages
27-31). In other words, the life-world is Habermas’s
response to the question of place.

There is the further possibility of non-
absolutist universalist ethics as in the case of
ethical utilitarianism, a normative theory that
proposes that the correct solution is the one that
provides the greatest good to the majority of the
population. However, within the domain of meta-
ethics the meaning of the good has tended to shift
depending on relative representations. This leads
us to our second substantial theory: according to
ethical relativists ethical truths emerge from within
distinctive social groups or distinctive social subjects
rather than equally and objectively across all groups.
Relativists believe that social groups do indeed differ
in their respective ethical value systems and that
each respective system constitutes a place of ethical
discourse. At the limit of relativist ethics is the belief
that the unique subject is the place from which
ethical principles are thought to arise. In this sense,
subjectivism is the limit of ethical relativist discourse.

Finally, ethical nihilism is the belief that ethical
truths, if they can be said to exist at all, derive from
the paradoxical non-place within the heart of any
place. Saul Newman described this non-place
in the following way: u [t]he place of power [and,

consequently, resistance] is not a place [...] Power,
as we have seen, does not reside in the state, or
in the bourgeoisie, or in law: its very place is that
of a ‘non-place’ because it is shifting and variable,
always being re-inscribed and reinterpreted” (italics
in original; Newman, [2001] 2007: 81). That
this non-place can only be articulated from within
the confines of conceptions of place, or in relation
to the foundation of place itself, therefore poses
a unique challenge for ethical philosophers: is
the paradox of non-place significant enough as
to lead one to reject its answer to the question of
place? Traditionally, those philosophers who have
adopted the paradoxical response to the question
of place have had the burden of proof to create an
account of their philosophical position that was
a sufficient response to the community at large.
However, the burden of proof argument is typically
used against those making positive ontological
arguments rather than those making negative or
paradoxical arguments such as I am making here
(cf. , Truzzi, 1976: 4). Nihilists seek to discredit
and/or interrupt all universalist and relativist
responses to the question of place and thus step
outside of the burden of proof. Thus, when I speak
about nihilism, I intend to describe meta-ethical
discourses that refuse to settle within conventional
manifest philosophy. Rather, nihilists are critics of

the unstable framework

all that currently exists and they raise this critique
against all such one-sided foundations and systems.

Saul Newman has described Max Stimer, whose
work, according to rumours from some anarchists,
inspired some of the writings of Nietzsche, 4 as the
proto-typical post-anarchist. For Newman, the
reason is simple: “Like poststructuralist thinkers
who were writing over a century later, Stimer [was]
troubled by the whole question of essentialism
[...] It is for this reason that Stimer [...] anticipates
[...] poststructuralism” (Newman, 2001: 55-6).
Max Stimer’s critique of the death of god revolved
around the paradox of place — Stimer argued that
Feuerbach’s humanist philosophy did not kill the
place of god but merely subsumed it beneath the
mask of man (Cf., Newman, [2009]). In this way, a
higher abstraction was created in place. Instead of
the positive essentialist metaphysics of man, Stimer
described accidental man using the concept of the
‘creative nothing’ (or the ‘un-man’), he thereby
described a uniquely identifiable variant of the
subjectivist school of meta-ethics. 5 It is probably

4 Some discussions about this topic that are happening here: http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_between_Friedrich_Nietzsche_and_
Max_Stirner

5 I believe that this accounts for the absence of any development
of the notion of comm -unity’. On this topic, Stirner pointed to some
unarticulated notion of the union of egoists’.

for this reason that Allen Wood described Stimer
as a “radical nihilist” (Wood, 1996: 222) rather
than a subjectivist (Wood, himself, often taking the
position of a ‘moral skeptic’ and/or ‘moral nihilist’),
and for the remainder of this thesis I will treat Stimer
quite faithfully as such. Stimer’s accidentalman does
not fall into the positive framework of meta-ethical
foundations but rather takes on the attributes of
the full range of meta-ethical philosophy. His work
must therefore be distinguished from, for example,
today's reading of the cogito. This nihilist response
to the question of place takes on a similar dimension
as the concept ‘anethicism’ does in the meta-ethical
writings of John Burgess:

Anethicism (or moral skepticism) main-
tains that [...] [ojrdinary people’s moral
judgements are meant as statements of
impersonal fact about absolute values,
but there are no such objective values,
so moral thinking involves a fundamen-
tal mistake and illusion. Anethicism is to
ethics as atheism is to theology (Burgess,
2007: 427).

The nihilist responds negatively to the place of
ethics just as the atheist responds negatively to the
place of god. For example, Nietzsche argued that
active nihilists, in negating traditional values, raise

the unstable framework

the possibility of the transvaluation of values: in this
sense, the active nihilist rejects the positive place of
ethics but only in order for her to leap forward into
the world of positive ethics anew. We find similar
arguments in the work of Bataille, Kierkegaard, Zizek,
Virilio, and others. Nihilists maintain that there may
be no objective guidelines for action, only manifest
reductions of a base reality. 6 1 shall come back to this
description of nihilism shortly.

I may now describe the problem of ontological
essentialism more broadly as the problem of stable
foundations in conceptions of place. It proves
fruitful to borrow an explanation from the feminist
literature, and in particular Diana Fuss:

[Ontological essentialism is] a belief in
the real, true essence of things, the in-
variable and fixed properties which define
the ‘whatness’ of a given entity. In femin-
ist theory the idea that men and women,
for example, are identified as such on the
basis of transhistorical, eternal, immutable
essences has been unequivocally rejected

6 For the purpose of this essay I have collapsed moral skepticism’ and
‘moral nihilism’ into a higher level category: ‘ethical nihilism.’ The differences
between the two concepts are a matter of subtlety rather than a matter of
extreme division, they thus serve my thesis better beneath one term. For
example, moral skeptics claim that “[n]o ethical belief is certain, all ethical
beliefs are unjustified” while moral nihilists believe that “[a]ll ethical
statements are false” (Wood, n.d.: 8).

by many anti - ess entialist poststructuralist
feminists concerned with resisting any at-
tempts to naturalize human nature (Fuss,

1989: xt).

Crucial, here, is the relationship of ontology,
essence, and representation. The problem with
ontological essentialism, for Fuss, is that it aims
to represent the subject as a transhistorical ideal.
In any case, essentialism includes all attempts to
describe universal attributes or practices that arise
in conjunction with one’s being across the positive
dimension. The popular contribution of post-
anarchist philosophy to the anarchist tradition has
been its exposition of the history of ontological
essentialism within (classical) anarchist literature.
Here I should be careful to distinguish between the
post-structuralist concern with difference and/or
; plurality and the Lacanian or Stimerian conjecture
of empty subjectivity. For example, Fuss brings
her rejection of anti-essentialism to the following
conclusion: “[ijmportantly, essentialism is typically
defined in opposition to difference; the doctrine of
essenceisviewedas preci s ely that whi ch s e eks to deny
or to annul the very radicality of difference” (Fuss,
1989: xii ) . We shall see that the problem of post-
anarchist political philosophy in the anglophone
world has been to reduce the anti-essentialist

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impulse to a system of knowledge whose answer to
the question of process has been restricted to the
post- structuralist emphasis on difference and/or
plurality. In this regard, the problematic emerges
not from the production of useful knowledge but
from the production of one hegemonic language
game. In short, pluralists (relativists) have allowed
us to understand that the problem of difference is
also the problem of democracy and liberal tolerance
in that difference and democracy are predicated
upon a faith in the subject’s ability to choose her
own reality. As one commentator on a popular
anarchist forum has put it: “I am really concerned
about the masked social democratic leanings of all
the radical postmodernists [...] I just get this feeling
that post-anarchism allows the appropriation of
the label of anarchism for academics that secretly
aspire to be the technocratic class of the global
social democratic state .” 7

In the nihilist case, this faith is put to rest:
the subject’s choices are always based on failure
and impossibility. For instance, Jacques Camatte,
describing the limits of democracy (as direct
democracy, a traditional anarchist idea), has argued
that democracy stands in the way of an authentic
communism:

7 See forum thread here: http://libcom.org/forums/history-culture/
post-anarchism-today- new-journal-anybody-read-it-26122010

[C]ommunism is the affirmation of a be-
ing, the true Gemeinwesen of man. Dir-
ect democracy appears to be a means for
achieving communism. However com-
munism does not need such a mediation.

It is not a question of having or of doing,
but of being (Camatte, 1969).

The resolution of the problem of system must
also go hand in hand with the resolution of the
problem of being. The problem of being must also
be revealed as the question of non-being. But the
problem of being is also hindered by the problem
of knowing. For this reason Allen Wood has argued
that ethical nihilism “is the diametrical opposite of
ethical relativism” and, as a result, “relativism denies
that anyone can say or believe [that] anything false”
(Wood, n.d.: 3). Relativism allows the ostensibly
autonomous subject to make a truth-claim but
relativists always endorse the truthfulness of this
claim positively (Wood, n.d.: 3). Relativists ignore
the latent dimension of ethics and rely too faithfully
on the manifest dimension. On the other hand,
nihilists retain the autonomy of the truth-claim but
recognize the paradoxical attributes of this claim —
there is a latent truth and there is a manifest truth:
[Rjelativism says that whatever anybody
believes must be true (for that person)

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[...] [nihilism] denies that we can ever
be sure which beliefs these are [...] [it]
is quite an extreme position, and prob-
ably false; but it is not threatened with
self-refutation, as relativism is. For it is
perfectly self-consistent to say that you
hold beliefs that are uncertain, or even
unjustified (Wood, n.d.: 4).

The consistency of the meta-ethical framework
is achieved, as Wood suggests, by granting the full
range of attributes to the foundation and the sys-
tem. Otherwise, the position consistently fails and
the one dimension is granted descriptive power over
the other. This provides us with a nice entry point
into the problem of epistemological foundational-
ism in positive responses to the question of process.

The Problem of Process and
Epistemological Foundationalism

The second area of study in meta-ethical phil-
osophy has traditionally concerned the process
(mental or practical) through which humans are
thought to arrive at the proper methods of self-
conduct (cf., Fieser, 2003). This includes the ‘why?’
and ‘how?’ questions that have further prompted
the development of semantic theories on eth-

ics. From the mid -thirteenth century process was
understood as forward movement (Harper, 2010b).
This implies a telos but my usage embraces all types
of movement, including movement without cause
and failed movements. Central to the preoccupation
on process has been the question of telos inherent
to consequential st ethics or else, as in non-con-
sequentialist ethics, the direction toward which, and
the epistemological function through which, the
ethical actor is thought to be moving. Finally, we ar-
rive at our second philosophical ap riori for much of
traditional and contemporary ethics. Whereas the
first a priori has approached the question of place
through metaphysics, the second has approached
the question of process through epistemology — the
study of truth, belief, and judgement in meta- ethics
as played out in the fictitious battle between cogni-
tivism and non-cognitivism.

The three substantial theories have also re-
sponded in various ways to the question of process.
I will provide the most popular configurations of the
function of process in a priori conceptions of place.
First, adherents of ethical universalism have tended
to maintain a singular truth across all social groups.
By way of example, Noam Chomsky, a noted liber-
tarian anarchist, has argued on more than one occa-
sion, that “one of the, maybe the most, elementary
of moral principles is that of universality, that is, if

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something is right for me, it’s right for you; if it’s
wrong for you, it’s wrong for me. Any moral code
that is even worth looking at has that at its core
somehow” (Chomsky, 2002). Chomsky’s adoption
of the universalist ethical discourse is nowhere more
apparent than in the response he has provided to his
critics regarding his participation in what has come
to be called the ‘Faurisson Affair.’ Chomsky, who
allegedly supported the ‘right’ of Robert Faurisson
to publicize his questionable thoughts on the holo-
caust — as Chomsky (1981) has put it, “he denies
the existence of gas chambers or of a systematic plan
to massacre the Jews and questions the authenticity
of the Anne Frank diary, among other things” — had
this to say in his defence:

[...] it is elementary that freedom of ex-
pression (including academic freedom)
is not to be restricted to views of which
one approves, and that it is precisely the
case of views that are almost universally
despised and condemned that this right
mustbe most vigorously defended (ibid.).

Kant’s categorical imperative rests upon this
axiom of generalizability and as a consequence
it bounds the ethical subject to the shared duties
illuminated through practical reason (cognitivism):
“This harmonizing with humanity as an end in itself

would, however, be merely negative and not positive,
unless everyone also endeavours, as far as he can,
to further the ends of others. For the ends of any
person who is an end in himself must, if this idea is
to have its full effect in me, be also, as far as possible,
my ends” (Kant, [1783] 2007: 181). Thus, for
Kant, the universalizing principle takes the form of
an imperative resulting from objective reason.

Adherents of the semantic theory associated
with ethical universalism have typically presumed an
objective place that is illuminated by the reasoning
capacities of the mind as in deontological ethics, or
empirical observations as in naturalist methodologies,
etc. Overall, the popular criticism against ethical
universalism has been that adherents have been
insensitive to the unique cultural codes of diverse
social groups and that they have therefore judged
the ethical actions of these groups according to
the standards of only one hegemonic social group.
As Todd May has put it, “[t]he threat posed [...] in
articulating a universal conception of justice is that of
allowing one linguistic genre (namely, the cognitive)
to dominate others” (May, 1994: 129). Mackie’s
critique of utilitarianism has stood the test of time
and has proved to be a useful critique in this respect:
People are simply not going to put the
interests of all their ‘neighbours’ on an
equal footing with their own interests [...]

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Such universal concern will not be the ac-
tual motive of their choice, nor will they
act as if it were (Mackie, 1977: 130-1).

Yet the question is inevitably raised: why do
ethical actors utter these statements, love thy
neighbour, and so on, if they do not believe them
to be true? Mackie’s response has alluded to the
psychoanalytical understanding of the role of
fantasy in everyday life:

It encourages the treatment of moral
principles not as guides to action but
as a fantasy which accompanies actions
with which it is quite incompatible [...]

To identify morality with something that
certainly will not be followed is a sure
way of bringing it into contempt — prac-
tical contempt, which combines all too
readily with theoretical respect (Mackie,
1977: 131-2).

This logic has close affinities with that of the
superego in Lacanian thought, which succeeds in
gamering control of the id by way of the subject’s
encouraged transgressions: Enjoy! Moreover, the
Lacanian interpretation of Mackie’s statement
would be that fantasized ethics are the very stuff
of the imaginary order — an order of presumed

wholeness, synthesis, similarity, and autonomy.

Bernard Williams’s response to the central
problematic of utilitarianism or consequentialism
provided a useful critique of utilitarianism and
consequentialism. He argued that people do not
judge actions according to their consequences
alone. As the Telegraph put it: “Williams pointed
out, a very quick way to stop people from parking on
double yellow lines in London would be to threaten
to shoot anyone that did. If only a couple of people
were shot for this, it could be justified on a simple
utilitarian model, since it would promote happiness
for the majority of Londoners” (Telegraph, 2003).
According to Williams, utilitarian ethicists do
not take their own discourse seriously — instead,
they appear to be victims of their own elaborate
fantasy. They thus fail to traverse the fantasy of
ethics. Traversing the fantasy implies bringing it
to its limit in order to expose the extent to which
the ethical system shatters. 8 The problem of ethical
universalism is therefore the problem of mistaking
fantasy for base reality, base reality is much rather
the unstable foundation of these limits.

This is the nature of fantasy in the political
context: we do not bring our political principles to

8 I do not mean to imply that there is an accessible underside to the
fantasy. Rather, I intend to point out that the fantasy is itself something
that can be fantasized about to the end.

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the end precisely in order to defend the principles
upon which our unstable ideologies depend. Is
this not what is at work in postmodern politics and
aesthetics? I hope that the reader will permit me
the minor detour to establish this claim. Politics as
the surplus of need rendering possible an activity of
novelty in the scopic field; this, in essence, defines
the public realm as the sphere of action. Hannah
Arendt insisted that those who acted in the public
realm were courageous — but for so long courage
referred to inner-most feelings rather than to the
natality of action in the public realm. What could
be more inner than that which is outside? Whatthis
something strange to me, although it is at the heart
of me is, for Lacan, is precisely the real of things
from which we are barred. It is an outside that is
paradoxically at the very heart of the subject. Things
have withdrawn from our viewing of them and, as
such, the fear that they arouse does not and can not
relate to the public realm of perception. Contrarily,
politics begins with our frightening relationship to
things in the world and with our inability to become
the thing among things that we are.

Walter Benjamin knew very well that children
had no need for politics. He took pleasure in his
childhood relationship to things, a pleasure sur-
mounted by an extreme discomfort on the verge of
his collapse. Very nearly had the young Benjamin

become a thing among the things that inhabited
the space of his hiding place. By encasing himself
within the world of things, he threatened to destroy
himself and become a thing with them: “The child
who stands behind the doorway curtain himself be-
comes something white that flutters [...] and behind
a door, he is himself a door” (Benjamin, 2006: 99).
The human intruder invited panic in Benjamin: “In
my hiding place, I realize what was true about all of
this. Whoever discovered me could hold me petri-
fied [...] [and] confine me for life within the heavy
door. Should the person looking for me uncover my
lair, I would therefore give a loud shout [...] with a
cry of self-liberation” (ibid., 100). A cry, perchance
for having failed in his impossible task, for having
chosen to be human in the face of abjection; a cry
that sounded in the memory of an adult day-dream-
ing of his more capable childhood. In the withdrawal
of things from view, fear and anxiety are primor-
dial — and the distance (however close) of things to
view is the founding for politics. Politics involves the
administration of fear, it is the fear of fear itself.

Fear is primordial. There is an activity to things.
It is the subject whom is subjected to things and it
is things that object to the subject. Lacan believed
that the subject was bom prematurely, weak. In
defence of the anxiety -provoking gaze of things, the
subject projects a stain/screen upon the landscape;

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thus begins the subject’s administration of fear.
Under postmodern conditions of late capitalism
fear is administered on the behalf of the subject
by unseen symbolic forces — this is the perversity
of postmodern ideology. Politics under postmodern
capitalism consists of being seen as apolitical agent
in public: candlelight vigils, Facebook pages, a
veritable Kierkegaardian moment where everybody
wins (ie, the state wins for ostensibly ‘allowing’ the
protesters to set up camp and the protesters win for
bringing themselves and their issues into view). Paul
Virilio’s work centres around this problem of the
stain as the accelerated bringing into view of things
under postmodern capitalism. Bertrand Richard
writes in the preface to Virilio’s newest book: “The
administration of fear is a world discovering that
there are things to be afrai d of but still convinced that
more speed and ubiquity are the answer” (Virilio,
2012: 10-1). Grey Ecology is the discovery of the
accident of postmodern capitalism — an accident that
is revealed as a movement from perversion toward
psychosis, from disavowal toward foreclosure, a
shift in the cultural logic of late capitalism. Today
we glimpse the emergence of a new regime of
power that sustains itself through an ideology of
claustrophobia: “imagine this universe where things
will already be there, already viewed, already given”
(Virilio, 2010: 34). Beneath the postmodern

‘circuits of drive’ a disaster is looming: “The fear
of acceleration is not there yet, but certain people,
who are claustrophobic, or asthmatic, already feel
this fear: the fear of exhausting the geo-diversity
of the world” (ibid., 33). The fear of acceleration
is the onset of postmodern psychosis and the
decline of symbolic efficiency, and claustrophobia
is the symptom of a world of speed, of the loss of
the nom-de-'pere. It is a fear of fear itself insofar
as claustrophobia is the foreclosure of the distance
separating ourselves from things.

Virilio contends that today “[w]e are in a
world of madness” (Virilio, 2010: 92), the onset
of which, I maintain, occurs as a response to the
acceleration of the image through the geometral
point of the eye. We are reminded that the first
machine of acceleration was “not the locomotive of
the industrial revolution [...] but the photographic
apparatus” (ibid., 58). Virilio thereby relegates the
problem of acceleration to the operations performed
across the scopic field, to the acceleration of the
stain: “[t]he machine of acceleration is the machine
of vision” (ibid., 58). The question of the scopic
field relates to the distance between two unities
in geometral space — the stain is the pollution of
a distance and this pollution becomes the central
problem of postmodern politics. Virilio writes, “[t]
he pollution of distance is grey ecology. One must

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keep one’s distance” (ibid., 81 ). The pollution of
our space from things occurs as a consequence of
the proliferation of images and as the ostensible
elimination of that distance. In the photo-graph
one quickly brings the world out there into one’s
hands — a deceiving picture of the world that
paradoxically brings reality further from view. A
fitting aphorism: ‘relationships are like sand in
the grip of your hand — held loosely and the sand
remains where it is, but gripped too tightly and the
sand tri ckles out.’ We have gripped things too tightly
in our hands — acceleration, hyper-conformity
has only made capitalism less perverse and more
psychotic! Today, one has the image or the photo-
graph without the sufficient number of point-de-
capiton [quilting points]. Virilio’s ‘University of
Disaster’ is the place from which the discovery of
accidents inherent to the acceleration of progress
might occur — and these discoveries are crucial
because they contribute, in whatever minimal way,
to the possibility of regaining some sense of the
world. The discovery of the airplane brought with it
the accident of the plane crash — and yet, to protect
ourselves from the fear of flying, we forget about
the accident and focus on the tele-vision folded-
out into view just a foot from our eyes. Perhaps the
appropriate counter-accident was JetBlue's in-flight
movie of ‘Air Emergency’.

Accidents are un-intenti onal byproducts

inherent to the intentional narcissism of progress.
In the scopic field they are best examined through
contemporary art. According to Virilio, the accident
of abstract art was thatitmade possible an aesthetics
of the invisible — ie, the task of post-war abstract art
was to bring the invisible into the geometral space,
into the visible. Virilio’s response to modem abstract
art is crucial for continental aesthetics: he reveals
the pollution of the visual field by the narcissism of
the imaginary. Thus, the symptom or accident of
postmodern capitalism is not just claustrophobia
but also glaucoma: “[without knowing it, there is
a restriction of the visual spectrum, and one loses
laterality. [...] Tele-objectivity is a glaucoma [...] In
the here and now, in the divine perception, and not
by way of a screen, of a microscope, or the screen
of a television, there is a very important element. I
am surprised to what degree people are no longer
able to orient themselves in life. They have lost their
perception of their lateral environment” (ibid., 56).
The glaucoma of postmodern capitalism: ‘eyes so
that they might not see.’ Lacan was clear on this
point: “In the scopic field, everything is articulated
between two terms that act in an antinomic way —
on the side of things, there is the gaze, that is to say,
things look atme, andyet I see them. This is how one
should understand those words, so strongly stressed

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in the Gospel, they have eyes that they might not see.
That they might not see what? Precisely, that things
are looking at them” (Lacan, 1988: 109). “To see,”
Virilio claims, “is not to know” (Virilio, 2010: 79).
Virilio teaches us that acceleration brings with it
the accident of seeing but not knowing, of acting
without knowing the intention or accidents inherent
to one’s acts or presentations, and so on. Eyes so
that they may not see, Virilio intends to remove our
eyes so that we might see.

Postmodern politics as the public activity of
those who do not act, postmodern aesthetics as
the visibility of that which the eyes can not see —
Virilio’s theory of aesthetics reveals the invisibility
of visibility itself. We ought to remember the
Lacanian dictum that the foreclosure of the nom-
de-yere results in the return of the symptom in
the real. In other words, what is rejected from
the symbolic register re-appears as an imaginary
guise in the real. Hubertus von Amelunxen, in
an admittedly confused conversation with Virilio,
has put this quite well: “Having read basically
everything that you have published, I have never
understood Art and Silence, because you turn the
fundamental argument of modernism, to render
visible, [...] around [by] saying that abstraction
anticipated the becoming-invisible of the world
of the visible” (Virilio, 2010: 57). This is why

Virilio’s work on aesthetics is better read alongside
Alain Badiou (cf., his fifteen theses on art), Slavoj
Zizek and Jacques Lacan, rather than Gilles
Deleuze, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Frangios Lyotard
or Jacques Ranciere. For example, the accident of
Malevich’s Black Square is fully exposed in Ad
Reinhardt’s Abstract Painting: in the former, a
‘new threshold’ for painting is breached — a black
square disrupts the hegemony of the figurative
line. But in the latter, the accident of the ‘new
threshold’ is made possible — after distancing
oneself from the painting, shifting one’s eyes and
perspective, one begins to see beneath the real of
the black square a re-emergence of the figurative
line. The accident, an accidental encounter with
the things of the world through over-proximity,
through the foreclosure of distance, this is the
visible hidden within the invisible. As Virilio puts it,
“[although the accident — the inherent potential for
derailment — is intentionally much less visible than
the ostensible benefits of any given development,
this ‘hidden face’ deserves critical attention” (ibid.,
136). It is this hidden face that challenges the
hysterical Left’s contemporary fascination with a
‘politics without politics’ (cf., Dean, 2009).

Postmodern politics, after Virilio, must
overcome the problem of the ‘wall of language’,
for it is also the problem of the culture industry,

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as Virilio writes: “We do not debate in the same
manner if we are in a lifeboat, an amphitheatre,
or a classroom. You see already the modification
of the debate for television, with the quickness of
the exchanges. This disrupts the contents between
the presenter and the so well-named, his ‘guest’. I
call this type of debate ‘ping-pong’. ‘You have five
seconds to respond.’ ‘ping-pong.’ [...] When I go on
television, I hate it. [...] I do not want to play ‘ping-
pong’” (Virilio, 2010: 65). Growing up I’ve become
familiar with the best way to practice for ping-pong
tournaments: one takes the table and folds one side
of it up so that it is against a wall. The ‘other’ player
becomes the wall itself. The ball bounces from the
player’s paddle toward the wall and bounces back
to the player in an inverted form. Perhaps it is time
to stop practicing our politics the way we practice
for a ping-pong tournament.

Virilio's GreyEcologyis an essential readforthose
looking to diagnose the accident of contemporary
politics. Itis also of interest to those dissatisfied with
the current democratic turn in the aestheticization
of politics and the politicization of aesthetics. The
book proves that there is the possibility for a non-
democratic but equally non-statist intervention into
aesthetics and politics. Virilio’s advice is to look the
Medusa in the eye, face our fears, and traverse the
fantasy of postmodern politics:

We must start at the end and head to-
wards the beginning, because the end is
here. The finitude of all art and the world
is here. Finitude is in front of us, and we
must start from the end, not in order to
cry, ‘Oh, it’s horrible.’ No, we must do this
in order to confront the end and be able to
go beyond it. I don’t know where this will
lead, by the way (Virilio, 2010: 72).

Whether in postmodern politics or in ethical
universalism, the appropriate political task is to
traverse the fantasy by beginning at the end. But
what is the fantasy of ethical relativism?

Ethical relativism retains the function of
truth-apt propositions but substitutes the belief
in universal truth for the related belief in multiple
(often competing) truth- claims that are relative
to differing conceptions of place. The problem
with ethical relativism is one of accounting for
the value of process in competing ethical groups
when one social group’s ethical code over-rules the
legitimacy of another process or value-system to
exist. This is the problem outlined by Todd May:
“The command to respect the diversity of language
games is precisely an ethical one; moreover, it is
a universally binding one” (May, 1994: 129).
The result is that one invites domination or else

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falls back into a universal prescriptivism: “[T]he
concern with ‘preserving the purity’ and singularity
‘of each genre’ by reinforcing its isolation from the
others gives rise to exactly what was intended to be
avoided: ‘the domination of one genre by another’,
namely, the domination of the prescriptive” (Sam
Weber as cited by Todd May, 1994: 129). Zizek
argued that this ethical code has become the
fantasy of contemporary liberal politics:

Today’s tolerant liberal multi culturalism
wishes to experience the Other deprived
of its Otherness (the idealized Other who
dances fascinating dances and has an
ecologically holistic approach to reality,
while features like wife beating remain
out of sight). Along the same lines, what
this tolerance gives us is a decaffeinated
belief, a belief that does not hurt anyone
and never requires us to commit our-
selves (Zizek, 2004).

Ethical relativism thereby renders invisible
what was previously visible in the project of ethical
universalism: a certain violence or domination. It is
for that reason all the more suspect and problematic
(how do we attack an enemy that we can no longer
see?). Jeffrey Reiman has described this as the
paradox of relativism:

Here enters the paradox: The critique
of universal standards because they ex-
clude certain individuals or groups of in-
dividuals is a critique of those standards
for not being universal enough! Con-
sequently, rather than abandoning or op-
posing universalism, the critique is itself
based on an implicit valuation, albeit one
that aims to be more inclusive than the
ones critiqued (Reiman, 1996: 253).

Reiman argued thatrelativismis founded upon
a fantasized image of universalism at its limit. His
critique was aimed at postmodern versions of me-
ta-ethics and, in particular, the ‘Postmodern Ethics’
of Zygmunt Bauman. If one is thereby committed
to a pluralist/relativist meta-ethics by way of one’s
rejection of the authoritarianism of universalist
meta-ethics, as in the case of post-anarchist me-
ta-ethics (at least according to Benjamin Franks’s
interpretation; c.f., Benjamin Franks, 2008a &
2008b), then one is forced to return once again to
the central problematic: how to account for a non-
authoritarian universalism? Reiman explained: “In
short, what postmodernism needs, what virtually
every postmodern writer writes as if he or she had,
but in fact does not have, is a universal standard
for valuing human beings which is compatible with

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the postmodern critique of universals” (Reiman,
1996: 254).

The problem of universalism is thereby
obscured by the relativist critique. There appear to
be two appropriate responses to this problem (or
dichotomy): the first is to rethink the meta-etbical
framework from within the positive discourse of
conventional meta-ethics, and; the second is to
reject all positive frameworks. It is my belief that
only a profoundly negative response is tenable and
consistent with the overall tendency of the anarchist
project. We are therefore met by the ostensible
moral dilemma of choosing any one side of the
relativist/universalist debate (this is also argued by
Lukes, 2008; but Lukes stands firmly on one of
the two sides), but in our case we have noticed that
which side one presumes does not matter so much
as how well one argues for their side through to its
end — or else the problem of the false dichotomy is
resolved by rejecting both relativist and universalist
approaches in favour of nihilism. In any case,
relativists believe that universal truth is constituted
by the competing truth-claims of particularly
situated social groups and/or subjects. A great
example of this approach came from Andrew Koch,
an early post-anarchist:

The truth value of any such assertions [in

universalist ethics] has been dissolved by

the poststructuralist critique. The plur-
ality of languages and the individuated
nature of sensory experience suggest
that each denotative and prescriptive
statement must be unique to each in-
dividual. Consensual politics is reduced
to an expression of power, the ability
for one set of metaphors to impose [...]
its validating conditions for truth (Koch,
[ 1993 ] 2011 : 37 ).

I will return to many of the examples that
I have provided in the remaining sections to
come, for now it will be enough to take each as a
particular example of the foundation and system of
conventional meta-ethical philosophy.

I may now briefly describe the problem of epis-
temological foundationalism as it relates to posi-
tive responses to the question of process. The belief
that there are basic or axiomatic belief systems that,
in turn, constitute the foundation for truth (upon
which further truth-claims may be constructed by
relation) is endemic to the foundationalist position.
Taken together, now, we may say that ontological
essentialism occupies the western side of the hori-
zontal axis of being while epistemological founda-
tionalism occupies the southern side of the vertical
axis of knowing, as co- constitutive of essence (dis-

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played in Figure 1.0):

Ethical nihilism proceeds on the basis of an
epistemological emptiness and/or uncertainty. Eth-
ical nihilists realize that truth-claims are pre-mised
upon failure. For some anarchists, such as Benjamin
Franks, there are significant problems with the eth-
ical nihilist position (we should also be aware of the
conflation in Franks’s work between ethical nihilism
and ethical relativism). Franks’s argument is best
summed up in the following passage:

The belief that the individual (or individ-
ual consciousness) is the fundamental
basis for the construction of, and justi-
fication for, moral values has a number
of fatal flaws for an anarchist or any pro-
ponent of meaning social action: (1) that
it is fundamentally solipsistic, denying
dialogue and discourse and the possibil-
ity of moral evaluation; (2) it recreates
social hierarchies of the form rejected by
the core principles of anarchism; and (3)
that [Max] Stimer’s own meta- ethical
account is epistemologically unsound
as it ignores its own social construction
(Franks, 2008a: 16).

I will approach a response to Franks’s argument
in the next section, for now it will be enough to dis-

Figure 1.0 - Essence

tinguish between two main variants of ethical nihil-
ism in relation to the dual question of process. Ethical
nihilists are epistemological skeptics and, depending
on their answer to the question of place, either hold
an agnostic preference in relation to truth, admitting
indifference to the fact that truth may or may not
exist and that it is not the aim of their own discourse,
or else they invite truth in all of its negative dimen-
sions. In the latter approach, truth is believed to occur
where existing truth claims are subverted. As we shall
see, ethical nihilists may also be radical/base subjec-
tivists (hereafter ‘base subjectivists’), particularly of
the Stimerian egoist variety that Franks critiques in
his article (although he attributes Stimer’s response
to place as positive rather than negative). I shall here-
after refer to the two nihilist positions, depending on
their respective answers to questions of place and
process, as ethical skepticism (as in the base subjec-
tivist variant) and deep ethical nihilism (as in the base
materialist variant). Ethical skeptics retain the subject
as the locus of political activity (a ‘within’ categor-
ization) while deep ethical nihilists reject the subject
entirely (a ‘without’ categorization).

The Absence of being in Subjectivist
and Materialist Meta-Ethics

Taken together, place and process presuppose
the possibility for a meta-ethical understanding

of the paradoxical essence of being as primordial
non-being, as demonstrated by the four potential
conclusions inherent to the meta- ethical question;
whereby V (plus) indicates a traditional conception
of that feature and (minus) indicate a paradoxical
conception of that feature; ie, V indicates stability
or presence in the feature and indicates that the
feature undermines itself, is absent, or else builds
presence upon its own negation/absence:

Four Meta-Ethical Codes

Ethical Code

Place

Process

Subjectivist

Base Subjectivist

Materialist

Base Materialist

Four potential codes may be constructed ac-
cording to this binary classification system and each
potential may be respectively labelled as follows:
(1) subjectivist, (2) base subjectivist, (3) materialist,
and; (4) base materialist. Each code is connected
to at least one of the substantial theories outlined
above (ethical universalism, ethical relativism, and
ethical nihilism) but, for the purposes of this essay,
let us consider this as an independent model. My
aim is to arrive at two pathways for understanding

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contemporary meta-ethics. These two pathways
will further describe post-anarchist meta-ethics to-
day, and post-anarchist meta-ethics after an inter-
vention with Georges Bataille’s philosophy.

In the traditional subjectivist code: place and
process refer to the stable and transparent qualities
of essence inherent in variants of humanist and exis-
tentialist metaphysics whereby the subject assumes
the position of mastery over her self-knowledge in
order to avoid the truth inherent to her blunders, un-
intentional utterances, and irrational desires (Fink,
1995: 43). As Sass has put it, in humanist philoso-
phy there is a faith “in the validity of the person’s self-
awareness” (1989: 446). Thus, the self-aware sub-
ject continuously brings herself into being through
repetitive movements in rational thought. The func-
tion of Descartes’s cogito, according to philosophers
of the subject of non-being (from Sartre to Bataille
and Lacan), has been to defend the fragile imagin-
ary ego formation from the trauma of the Real by
concealing its inevitable counteracting effects: “He
[Descartes] conceptualizes a point at which think-
ing and being overlap: when the Cartesian subject
says to himself, ‘I am thinking’, being and thinking
coincide momentarily” (Fink, 1995: 43). The sub-
ject of the subjectivist code submits herself to the
foreign demands made onto her and internalizes
these cause(s) as her own. However, in doing so the

primordial fear nonetheless returns: she has always
deviated from this template and she will continue
to do so until she takes the time to gaze into the
darkness from whence her perversions arose. Fink
has described this former process as ‘ego thinking’
whereby the ego attempts to “legitimate blunders
and unintentional utterances by fabricating after-
the-fact explanations which agree with the ideal
self-image” (Fink, 1995: 44). It is in this sense that
we may conclude that humanist meta-ethics, like all
positive ethical systems, are founded within the im-
aginary order.

In summation, the subject of the subjectivist
code perpetually aims to conceal the inevitable rup-
tures in her thinking as a result of the original onto-
logical mistake answered by the meta-ethical ques-
tion of place: the coherence granted to the subject
by her essence registers itself as a manifestation of
the imaginary order, an imaginary ego formation and
maintainability (ideal-ego/ego-ideal), rather than as
the radically foreign and impossible Real ego — here
we might imagine Lacan’s Schema L, the imaginary
axis of a to a ’ constitutes this field). While this does
not preclude the influence of the Real in imaginary
and symbolic thought it does, as it were, function to
conceal (or repress) the trauma of this loss.

In the base subjectivist code the belief in a
truth-bound subject is retained but only as a cri-

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tique of telos. The telos of truth, liberation, and the
dialectic of history, and so on, is disrupted by an
epistemological process that gears itself toward the
darkness of the unconscious. Jacques Lacan, the
exemplar of the base subjectivist code, appropriated
the inverted form of Descartes’s cogito as: ‘either I
am not thinking or I am not’{ ‘Ouje ne pense pas ou
je ne suis pas). The presumption was that the sub-
ject is constituted by a fundamental split between
thinking ( ‘either I am not thinking ) and being ( ‘or
I am not). The lineage of classical and tradition-
al philosophical thought since Plato (and through
Aristotle), as well as the positive foundations and
systems upon which these traditions have been built,
have traditionally upheld the belief in an inextricable
connection between the positive responses to place
and process. After the base subjectivist re-reading of
Freud, through Jacques Lacan’s writing, one is able
to analytically distinguish between several potential
relationships in place and process and to thereafter
incorporate absence or accident as the full range of
one’s being as well as the full range of one’s know-
ing. In the base subjectivist code the subject is re-
tained as the place from which ethics are thought
to derive but the process through which these eth-
ics are believed to be filtered is reverted toward a
constitutively open discourse whereby the subject’s
self-knowledge is no longer concealed by imagin-

ary identifications with foreign causes or essences.
Instead, the subject assumes the place from which
her irrational desires emanate and she is no longer
obligated to give way to her everyday rational desires
(‘ ne ce pas ceder sur son desid).

In this sense, the subject does not become
sensu stricto non-being but she becomes symbolic-
ally aware of the non-being at the heart of her be-
ing. In a word, she understands and comes to oc-
cupy that split between her essential ego formation
and the desires that continuously call this forma-
tion into question. This is what Lacan meant when
he argued that “[ojnce the subject himself comes
into being, he owes it to a certain non-being upon
which he raises up his being” (Lacan, 1988: 192)
and “being of non-being, that is how / comes on
the scene as a subject who is conjugated with the
double aporia of a veritable subsistence that is abol-
ished by his "knowledge, and by a discourse in which
it is death that sustains existence” (Lacan, [1960]
2006: 679). This is precisely a social death that
occurs in tandem with the negation of one’s place
in any discursive system, for the destruction of
knowledge is simultaneously the destruction of
ethics and the destruction of ethics can only be es-
tablished from within the foundation of knowledge;
knowledge is to be thought of as the symbolic ap-
paratus of language, or what Lacan has designated

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as ‘imaginary knowledge’ or connaissance (Lacan,
1973: 281). Is this not the meaning behind Freud’s
oft-cited thesis that ‘[a] man should not strive to
eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with
them, they are legitimately what directs his conduct
in this world’?

I shall pose my answer to this question as the
following provocation: is the return of ethics in pol-
itical and social philosophy not also the symptom
of its defeat by the imaginary symbolic system of
knowledge? To get into accord with this complex
presumes the misdirected and confused passions of
the militant whose actions are fraught with mental
anguish and who therefore proceeds with great re-
luctance and caution. This approach, what has been
coined the ‘ethics of the Real’, has been described
in great depth by Alenka Zupancic. Zupancic has
argued that ethics is paradoxical insofar as “[t]he
heart of all ethics is something which [...] has noth-
ing to do with the register of ethics [...] [Instead it]
concerns something which appears only in the guise
of the encounter, as something that [...] surprises us,
throws us ‘out of joint’” (2000: 235). This at first
appears to be a radically foreign materialist ethical
system but it falls back to the ethics of the receptive
subject for it is she who must perform the ethical act.
The Real is that which interrupts the smooth func-
tioning of the subject’s ideological universe and it is

also the Real that allows for this universe to become
reconfigured by the symbolic system (Zupancic,
2000: 235): “[h]ence the impossibility of the Real
does not prevent it from having an effect in the
realm of the possible” (Zupancic, 2000: 235).

The ethics of the act occurs by way of the sub-
ject’s reception of the Real: “will I act in conformity
[with] what threw me ‘out of joint’, will I be ready to
reformulate what has hitherto been the foundation
of my existence?” (Zupancic, 2000: 235). This is
likewise the approach argued for by Richard J. F. Day
in his book Gramsciis Dead (2005). For Day, as for
Lacan, the ethics of the Real (or ‘politics of the Act’)
is required to disrupt the inevitable perpetuation of
the politics of demand:

[E]very demand, in anticipating a re-
sponse, perpetuates these structures,
which exists precisely in anticipation of
demands. This leads to a positive feed-
back loop, in which the ever-increasing
depth and breadth of apparatuses of
discipline and control create ever-new
sites of antagonism, which produce new
demands, thereby increasing the quan-
tity and intensity of discipline and con-
trol. [...] It is at this point that a politics of
the act [or ethics of the Real] is required
(Day, 2005: 89).

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Day describes the ethics of the Real as the
subject’s ability to “go through [...] the fantasy of
the symbolic system”; “[gjoing through the fantasy
in this case means giving up on the expectation
of a non-dominating response from structures of
domination” (Day, 2005: 89). Day has been one of
very few anarchist philosophers to adequately tackle
the meta-ethical question of anarchism. To the
extent that I can, at this point, come into agreement
with Day it is in that particular quality of his more
concrete ethics, what he terms the ‘ethics of affinity,’
that affirms “a logic that escapes reason — the logic
of affinity, [...] [which] involves other affects such as
passion, strategy, rhetoric and style” (2001: 23). Itis
this logic of passion, rhetoric and style, as an escape
from reason, that remains tied to the base subjectivist
node as I describe it here.

In the materialist code positive conceptions of
place are rejected and traditional understandings of
telos are largely retained. The subject is abandoned
as the site from which ethics are derived but all
ethics are thought to arrive as aresponse to the truth
inherent to the goal (s)ought. Although I do not
wish to enter into a debate about the plausibility of
the claim that Marx was a consequentialist, I would
nonetheless hazard to provide an interpretation
of aspects of Marx’s work as the embodiment of
the materialist code as I describe it here. In other

words, this should be thought of as an example of
consequentialism not as an argument that Marx’s
work was in fact consequentialist. One should
furthermore note that Marx was not an ethicist
and meta-ethical interpretations of his work rely
principally on the latent rather than the manifest
interpretation. Derek P. H. Allen, describing the
utilitarian tendency of consequentialism, has
argued that:

Marx believes social revolution is a moral-
ly justifiable goal because [...] it is a neces-
sary condition of general freedom. Then to
the extent that some act n is causative of
social revolution, it is to that extent and
for that reason morally justifiable. The
statement [...] is consistent with utilitar-
ianism (if ‘ought’ is qualified by prima
facie) in case the social revolution is in
someone’s interest. Marx believes acts
causative of social revolution are in the in-
terests of the proletariat; to that extent his
position is compatible with utilitarianism
[and, I would also add, ethical universal-
ism] (1973: 189).

Thus, because the question of ethics in Marx’s
own writing has only been answered by the latent
content — by way of which we may arrive at the con-

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sequentialist reading — it is difficult to infuse Marx-
ist politics with consistent anti -authoritarian ethical
obligations, as many attempt to do today, unless first
of all tactically pairing the meaning of the manifest
content with the latent and manifest anti -authori-
tarian tendencies of anarchistpolitical philosophy. In
this case, anarchism rescues Marxism from the au-
thoritarian, consequentialist, interpretation. For the
purpose of this chapter it will be enough to describe
materialism as the dogma that aligns itself with the
a posteriori knowledge of material conditions re-
vealed through teleological conceptions of truth.

In this regard, Georg Lukacs provided an ad-
equate and useful explanation of dialectical mater-
ialism: “The premise of dialectical materialism is,
we recall: ‘It is not men’s consciousness [a rejec-
tion of ‘place’] that determines their existence, but
on the contrary, their social existence [an affirma-
tion of ‘process’] that determines their conscious-
ness.’ [...] Only when the core of existence stands
revealed [through knowledge-valued methodolo-
gies/processes] as a social process can existence
be seen as the product, albeit the hitherto uncon-
scious product, of human activity” (Lukacs, 1919:
§5). Lukacs, and many other Marxists, strongly
criticized what they saw as the bourgeois individ-
ualism of subjectivist ethics (and, here, like Franks,
they have also conflated the base subjectivist ten-

dency with the subjectivist one). But according to
some of the post-anarchists, the materialist ethic
reaches its highest and most potent form in the
development of the vanguard party. The vanguard
party is said to have the astutely positioned role of
generating knowledge about matters of the current
context based on the trajectory of the necessary
movement toward communism, and then transfer-
ring this knowledge onto those who otherwise lack
the proper awareness about such matters. Is this
not one of the possible interpretations of the func-
tion of false or betrayed consciousness amongst the
revolutionary class as preached by traditional or so-
called orthodox Marxist intelligentsia, that is, that
they value certain truth claims as universal in scope
while rendering other forms of knowledge as, pe-
joratively speaking, non-knowledge?

Finally, in the base materialist code, the subject
as the place of resistance no longer holds and a deep
nihilism takes over the epistemological function.
Truth is gained by reductions in useful knowledge.
My reading of the significance of recent develop-
ments in nihilist communist thought, particularly
the writings of the Dupont brothers (writing under
the following pen names, at least: Monsieur Dupont,
here dupont, and Le Gargon Dupont) is that there is
a base materialist philosophy inherent to their pro-
vocation. I would like to quote at length because I

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believe that nihilist communism has not received the
attention it deserves:

Pro -revolutionary thought is negative
thought because it criticises what exists
and because it proposes a solution that
is real only in the sense that it can be
conceived of — it says no to reality and
yes to what does not exist [an answer to
the question of place]. At this juncture
there has always been a separating of the
ways as to what to do next, the most ob-
vious solution is to attempt some kind of
transfer or projection of the milieu’s con-
sciousness onto the everyday conscious-
ness of the masses [this is the problem
of the vanguard party as a consequence
of false consciousness]. When this strat-
egy fails, and for each successive genera-
tion of revolutionaries, it has failed, some
small fragment of the milieu has re-
cognised the negative character of milieu
thought, its incommunicability, and then
it rediscovers nihilism [an answer to the
question of process]. This is the last pos-
ition, it seeks only to give nothing back,
to hold onto the negative, that there is
something remaining, not bound in by
the suffocating powers anayed against it.

It refuses to engage on any terms. The
nihilist fragment seizes hold of the nega-
tive character and develops it as far as
possible within the confines of the con-
temporary pro-rev framework. The nihil-
istic tendency develops [...] because it
recognises that the only other option is a
return to politics and complicity. [...] The
return to positivity erupts at every step
within the negative project; you observe
how supposed revolutionaries suddenly
throw themselves into political cam-
paigns determined by events, particu-
larly during elections, and which have no
bearing on expressed pro -revolutionary
values. [...] ([Tjhese arguments have ap-
peared in the anarchist journal Freedom
and originate in ‘class struggle anarchist’
circles, that is from those who imagine
themselves to have the most radical and
uncompromising agenda). [...] Their an-
alysis is overburdened by strategy-think
[...] [and] the immediatistic whizz of solv-
ing stated, specific problems (frere du-
pont, 2004).

I believe that frere dupont’s provocation de-
scribes precisely the radical appropriation of the

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nihilist ethic. Taken to its limit, nihilist communism
is perhaps the only base materialist political phil-
osophy in practice today.

Georges Batai lie’s base materialist nihilism is
apparent in the Dupont’s texts. Bataille’s oeuvre
represents a deep ethical nihilism for two reasons.
First, he strongly negated all positive notions of
place: “[T]horough-going dehumanization of na-
ture, involving the uttermost impersonalism in the
explanation of natural forces, and vigorously atheo-
logical cosmology. [...] An instinctive fastidiousness
in respect to all the traces of human personality, and
the treatment of such as the excrement of matter;
as its most ignoble part, its gutter” (Land, 1992:
xx). Unlike the ethical subject in base subjectivist
meta-ethics, the subject as a metaphysical category
is a symptom rather than a solution to the ques-
tion of political space. Second, he strongly opposed
strictly positive answers to the question of process:
“Ruthless fatalism. No space for decisions, respon-
sibilities, actions, intentions. Any appeal to notions
of human freedom discredits a philosopher beyond
amelioration” (Land, 1992: xx). Unlike the ethical
act in base subjectivist meta-ethics, the subject’s
decisions are inconsequential — the best approach
is none at all. This is a form of nihilism that tests
the limits of ethics (Nick Land has argued that Ba-
taille’s nihilism is a full rejection of ethics, cf., Land,

1 992: xx\ here, I would claim that it is much rather
a proclamation of an ethics of the second order)
while rejecting the telos of consequentialist ethics:
“Nihilism is the loss of this goal, the nullification of
man’s end, the reversion of all work to waste. It is
in this sense that history is aborted by zero” (Land,
1992: xx). Nihilism is therefore the founding of a
politics of failure in a space of emptiness. Bataille’s
nihilism involves the loss of the political subject as
well as the political project. I will explore Bataille’s
paradoxical ethics in another section of this essay,
for now it will be enough to situate Bataille’s oeuvre
firmly within the base materialist response to meta-
ethical questioning. Can we not suggest, at least,
since it is perhaps on the minds of all contempor-
ary meta-ethicists and yet rarely brought to fruition
(Wood, 1996: 221-3), that Bataille’s nihilism is
meta-ethics ■proper, that it is the fullest response
to the negation of place and process within the me-
ta-ethical framework? If we are to subscribe to the
nihilist currents within contemporary meta-eth-
ical philosophy (and, I will remind the reader that
Wood has argued that this is where contemporary
meta-ethicists are today) we may also suggest that
the base materialist discourse is a rejection of the
full range of positive foundations and systems.

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Anarchism, The Latent Tradition

I have been hinting that we can further divide
each of the two areas ofmeta- ethical philosophy into
manifest and latent subtypes, thus providing another
dimension of possibility with which to describe the
various paradigms of anarchist philosophy. We may
distinguish between the explicit (whereby what one
considers explicit in a text one also considers to be
approaching the objective reading by subtracting the
author’s unstated intentions and the context within
which the author has written. I am aiming to de-
scribe the literal) and the implicit (whereby what
one understands to be implicit one also believes to
be brushing the intentions or desires of the author
through a negation of the manifest content or else
through an interpretation of themes evident across
collective representations of texts) elements of the
text with respect to questions of place and process.
It should be noted that by invoking the concept of in-
tentionality I do not mean to bring about an alliance
with hermeneutic methodologies. My belief is that
hermeneuticism — at least emblematic in the writ-
ings of Paul Ricoeur (cf., Ricoeur, 1981) and Quen-
tin Skinner (cf., Skinner, 1989) — rely on a faith in
the smooth dialogue between two cogitos. That is,
hermeneuticism involves a belief at some level that
message M arrives to participant B from participant
A in an unaltered form, as M. Moreover, message

M carries with it the intentions and context of the
original transmission (as something in Afmore than
M). However, the lineage of continental philosophy,
beginning at least with Bataille through to Lacan,
assumes precisely the reverse (for more on this see,
for example, Frank & Bowtie’s work on hermen-
euticism in Jacques Lacan’s work, 1997: 97-122).
Latent content reveals itself as the discoverable con-
sistency — rather than the explainable intentionality,
objective context, or objective meaning — within the
residue of the manifest content (Neuendorf, 2002:
5). Another way of thinking the manifest/latent di-
chotomy comes from Gray & Densten and Hair et
ah: Gray & Densten have defined the manifest con-
tent as “elements [within a text] that are physically
present and countable” (bringing to mind quantita-
tive methodologies in sociology) (Gray & Densten,
1998: 420). Hair et al. have described the latent
content as “[contents that] cannot be measured dir-
ectly but can be represented or measured by one or
more [...] indicators” (bringing to mind qualitative
methodologies in sociology) (Hair et al. as cited in
Berg, 2001: 148). Each definition applies to the in-
terpretation of textual documents but owes a certain
debt to the psychoanalytical methods developed ori-
ginally by Freud.

Freud was principally interested in the analysis
of manifest dream content by working through the

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implications of latent determinations, the dream
thoughts:

All dreams of the same night belong,
in respect of their content, to the same
whole; their division into several parts,
their grouping and number, are all full
of meaning and may be regarded as
pieces of information about the latent
dream-thoughts. In the interpretation
of dreams consisting of several main
sections, or of dreams belonging to the
same night, we must not overlook the
possibility that these different succes-
sive dreams mean the same thing, ex-
pressing the same impulses in different
material. That one of these homologous
dreams which comes first in time is usu-
ally the most distorted and most bashful,
while the next dream is bolder and more
distinct (1961: 216-217).

The themes that emerge from “successive
dreams” refer directly to the latent dream thoughts
while the manifest dream content refers to the in-
dividual “pieces of information”. When the mani-
fest content is thus grouped it brings “bolder and
more distinct” meaning to the preceding particular
dreams. Freud’s writing at times confirmed the nega-

tive and elusive character inherent to the thoughts
of the latent content in the manifest dream-work,
as the following passage appears to suggest:

Now, however, a new state of affairs
dawns upon me. The affection in the
dream does not belong to the latent con-
tent, to the thoughts behind the dream;
it stands in opposition to this content; it
is calculated to conceal the knowledge
conveyed by the interpretation. Probably
this is precisely its function. I remember
with what reluctance I undertook the
interpretation, how long I tried to post-
pone it, and how I declared the dream
to be sheer nonsense. [...] It has no in-
formative value [...] (Freud, 1961: 99).

Thus, the latent dream content provides the
elusive impetus for the manifest elements of the
dream — it is, so to speak, the motor of the dream , its
foundation and system. To provide a crude example
with respect to the anarchist emphasis on the place
of power I would suggest the following conjecture as
the quantitative summation of countless individual
anarchist texts: ‘ Anarchists are against the State,
Patriarchy, and the Church because representation
and power are an inadequate framework for every-
day life’. More often than not, one finds a variant of

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this expression in the grassroots publications of con-
temporary anarchists rather than in the theoretical
wellspring from which their actions are sourced, but
this does not detract from my overall point

Admittedly, the previous statement comes
easy to me because it refers to the typical structures
against which the majority of anarchists position
themselves. But the question must be raised, fol-
lowing Saul Newman: “Why is it that when some-
one is asked to talk about radical politics today one
inevitably refers to this same tired, old list of strug-
gles and identities? Why are we so unimaginative
politically that we cannot think outside the terms of
this ‘shopping list’ of oppressions?” ([2001] 2007:
171). In Lacanese, what we are dealing with is pre-
cisely the movement from ‘symptom’ to ‘sinthome’.
The question of latent content is raised in this re-
spect because, despite the clarity of the manifest
content within the original texts in question, par-
ticular anarchists continue to restrict their analyses
of power to the realization of concrete struggles and
identities which are recuperated into the imagin-
aries of radical critical interpretation. This approach
certainly manifests in practice what was before ren-
dered a negative force in the latent philosophical
text — but it does not mimic in practice what was
practised in theory such that practice itself might be
regarded as a manifest symptom of a latent function.

Certainly, I may say at this point that the
negative process reflected in what may come to
be regarded as key nihilist texts are themselves to
be regarded as practices at the level of discourse
rather than armchair speculations about life de-
tached from practical relevance. Here, the negation
of the manifest discourse may be thought of as a
practice but we can not say the contrary: that the
practice of the timeless reenactment of the mani-
fest discourse can be thought of as negation. The
anarchist tradition, taken in full, transcends these
limited prescriptions, quite often identifying these
manifestations of limited practice as symptoms of
a larger ethos inherent to anarchist thought and
practice but not reducible to them.

It has become quite fashionable in some
anarchist circles to argue for an anarchism that
is rooted in practice and to subsequently declare
that the entire anarchist tradition collapses around
this principle. But this strikes me as profoundly
short-sighted: anarchism can not be reduced to an
assemblage of practices and/or ideas but rather it
has come to embody the tension between and against
these two poles. Quite often anarchists have mined
the valuable ideas implied in given practices and
explored their implications for philosophy. On the
other hand, anarchists have also founded a practice
of philosophy and named this ‘direct action at the

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level of thought.’ For example, Alejandro de Acosta
has argued that there has been an undiscovered
tendency within traditional anarchist philosophy:
Philosophers allude to anarchist prac-
tices; philosophers allude to anarchist
theorists; anarchists allude to philoso-
phers [...] What is missing in this schema,

I note with interest, is anarchists allud-
ing to philosophical practice (Alejandro
de Acosta, in Rousselle & Evren, 2011:

117).

In any case, the concrete manifest statement
in my example is that the State (and I am inclined
to also describe this as the State -ment) is an
illegitimate framework for ethics, but now we may
arrive at the latent definition of anarchism as an
attitude of hostility in the face of representation
and power (or else, as in base materialist variants,
the profoundly negative an-archy that ceaselessly
intervenes in the politics of representation). After
the subtraction of the manifest content we arrive
at the latent content: ‘Anarchists are against
the State, Patriarchy, and the Church, because
representation and power are an inadequate
framework for political life’. Is this not precisely
what an ethics of the real, and, indeed, Lacanian
psychoanalysis as the traversal of the fantasy, is all

about? The problem thus becomes: how can we be
against representation and power without falling
into the service of representation and power. The
answer is paradoxical.

Jesse Cohn has analytically distinguished
between ‘typical’ and ‘essential’ anarchist state-
ments. ‘Anarchists are against representation and
power’, this aligns itself with Cohn’s definition of
the essential:

When I say typical, I am referring to
anarchism as a material fact of history,
when I say essential, I am referring to
anarchism as an idea. The essence is an
abstraction from material fact, a gen-
eralization about what it is that unites
anarchists across different historical per-
iods in an anarchist tradition, about the
ways in which individual self-identified
anarchists have identified themselves
(diachronically) with the historical move-
ment as well as (synchronically) with
their living cohort (Cohn, 2006: 15).

I believe that Cohn’s model (typical/essential)
is somewhat inferior to Freud’s (manifest/latent)
because it precludes the discovery of certain key
anarchist tendencies and philosophies including,
most notably, Max Stimer and inheritors of the

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egoist anarchist tradition (Renzo Novatore, Zo d’Axa,
Bruno Filippi, among others) who have always
remained on the periphery of traditional anarchist
thought, challenging its most basic assumptions.
One has always had the sense that these thinkers
were anarchists but it has been difficult to integrate
them into the traditional language of anarchism . 9
There is thus an ambiguity among the majority of
anarchist scholars as to their place in the lineage or
canon. I would like to include them in the lineage
rather than exclude them because I believe that
their inclusion invites new ways of conceiving old
ideas . 10 Taken together, anarchism as a tradition,
has referred to this latent ethical impulse against

9 See Jason McQuinns discussion of Stirner from Anarchy: A Journal
of Desire Armed: “Stirner s [...] absolute refusal of any and all forms of
enslavement has been a perennial source of embarrassment for would-
be anarchist moralists, ideologues, and politicians of all persuasions
(especially leftists, but also including individualists and others). By
clearly and openly acknowledging that every unique individual always
makes her or his own decisions and cannot avoid the choices of self-
possession or self- alienation and enslavement presented at each moment,
Stirner scandalously exposes every attempt not only by reactionaries, but
by self-proclaimed radicals and alleged anarchists to recuperate rebellion
and channel it back into new forms of alienation and enslavement”
(McQuinn, 2010).

10 [revision: I would like to exclude them rather than include
them, because their exclusion further excludes the possibility of
their recuperation. See, for example, my forthcoming review of Saul
Newman's edited book Max Stirner, with The Journal for the Study of
Radicalism, 2012, Vol. 6., No. 2]

representation and power. As Jesse Cohn has put it,
[T]he historical anarchist movement pre-
sented a socialist program for political
transformation distinguished from reform-
ist and Marxist varieties of socialism by its
primary commitment to ethics, [as] ex-
pressed [by]: 1) a moral opposition to all
forms of domination and hierarchy (par-
ticularly as embodied in the institutions of
capitalism and the State, but also as mani-
fested in other institutions, eg, the fam-
ily, and in other relationships, etc, those
of city and country or empire and colony)
and, 2) a special concern with a coherence
of means and ends [a rejection of telos]
(Cohn, 2006: 14).

Cohn has strategically described an ethics that
is outside of the manifest symptom, but he has also
included manifest, particular, embodiments of this
ethics as an example (ie, ‘particularly as embodied
in the institutions of capitalism and the State,’ and
so on). Traditionally, anarchists have been forced
to provide concrete examples so as to avoid the
distanciation-effect of theory. But is not Cohn’s
concretization of ethics the real distance? Does it
not, by inscribing a shopping list of struggles and
identities, reduce the playing field of politics? One

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must therefore seek to remain consistent with the
latent force rather than the manifest structure
of anarchist ethics, for there is a negativity that
is at the very core of the anarchist tradition. This
negativity is akin to that which is discussed by the
meta-ethicist John L. Mackie:

[W]hat I have called moral scepticism is
a negative doctrine, not a positive one: it
says what there isn’t, not what there is.

It says that there do not exist entities or
relations of a certain kind, objective val-
ues or requirements, which many people
have believed to exist. If [this] position is
to be at all plausible, [it] must give some
account of how other people have fallen
into what [it] regards as an enor, and this
account will have to include some positive
suggestions about how values fail to be
objective, about what has been mistaken
for, or has led to false beliefs about, ob-
jective values. But this will be a develop-
ment of [the] theory, not its core: its core
is the negation (Mackie, 1977: 17-8).

Anarchism is primarily an ethical tradition dis-
guised by many of its manifest symptoms and the
development of its theory should be distinguished

from an elaboration, paradoxical as it may be, of
its ethical structure. This thesis (that anarchism is
primary about ethics) has been raised in many ways
(and rarely explored) by many anarchist intellectuals
including, most pertinently, David Graeber, who has
argued that, as Simon Critchley has retold it, “Marx-
ism is typically a theoretical or analytical discourse
about revolutionary strategy, whereas anarchism can
be understood as an ethical discourse about revolu-
tionary practice” (2008: 125). It therefore becomes
apparent that the anarchist identity, and likewise
anarchist subjectivity, depends, firstly, upon its com-
mitment to ethics, and therefore all variants of an-
archism must demonstrate to the best extent pos-
sible that they have remained faithful to this ethos.
The ethical task set before the anarchists is one of
either discovering the latent impulse anew in mani-
fest content (a questionable enterprise if I may say as
this subordinates the unique attribute of anarchism
to a theory and restricts the focus to the logic of de-
sire; this is what anglophone analysts referred to the
‘discourse of the analyst’) or else, moving backwards,
rejecting the premise that radical politics depends es-
sentially upon caricatures of ontology or epistemol-
ogy by which Truth and non-being are exaggerated in
order to uphold certain political effects. The alterna-
tive is to simply offer no -thing, and to fail in this task
(in Lacanese, this is a movement from desire to drive).

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Anarchy Through Three Discourses

Table 2.0 outlines the conceptual linkages
across the three bodies of thought that I have
touched upon here and that I will continue to
outline in the remaining essay:

Table 2.0—

Place and Process Through Three Discourses

Ethical Code

Place

Process

Subjectivist
Classical Anarchism

Base Subjectivist
Post- Anarchism

Materialist
Classical Marxism

Base Materialist
Georges Bataille

Reading from the vertical matrix, within mani-
fest traditional anarchist philosophy ethics are
thought to derive from the subjectivity of those seek-
ing to dismantle a limited selection of apparatuses of
power (the State, the Church, Patriarchy, etc) from an
external place of resistance (Humanity, Brotherhood,
the Proletariat, etc) as the latent desire to dismantle

101

all systems of representation and power (Newman,
2004: 107-26). Oppositional politics of this kind
tend to take on the characteristics of the hysteric’s
discourse which, sharing a certain legitimization for
the rationalization of the master’s discourse (by pro-
viding an impetus for knowledge in the university),
can be said to uphold the master’s discourse. As
Bruce Fink has put it:

[T]he hysteric goes at the master and
demands that he or she show his or her
stuff, prove his or her mettle by pro-
ducing something serious in the way of
knowledge [...] Lacan [...] suggests here
that [the] hysteric gets off on knowledge.
Knowledge is perhaps eroticized to a
greater extent in the hysteric’s discourse
than elsewhere. In the master’s discourse,
knowledge is prized only insofar as it can
produce something else, only so long as
it can be put to work for the master; yet
knowledge itself remains inaccessible to
the master. In the university discourse,
knowledge is not so much an end in it-
self as that which justifies the academic’s
very existence and activity. [The] hysteric
thus provides a unique configuration
with respect to knowledge (1995: 133).

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There is thus the lingering problem of positive
conceptions of process in the discourse of the
hysteric to such an extent that the problem of telos
begins to raise its head once again. It is not for the
purpose of overcoming or transgressing the master
(incarnated as the State, the Patriarch, etc) that
the subject of hysteria provokes the master where
he is lacking (that is, in the master’s knowledge)
but precisely for the purpose of maintaining a
distance from the responsibility the subject has to
overcome or transgress — the problem of the master
is too difficult for the hysteric to overcome. Jacques
Lacan, lecturing to the revolutionary students of
Paris in May, 1968, had this to say: “Revolutionary
aspirations have only one possibility: always to end
up in the discourse of the master. Experience has
proven this. What you aspire to as revolutionaries
is a master. You will have one!” (Lacan in Julien,
1994: 64). If it were merely a question of opposing
any of these independent nodes of power from
the standpoint of any number of identities then
manifest anarchist subjectivity would also be the
subjectivity of that which it opposes.

Hysterics, as Bruce Fink argues, “get off on
knowledge” (1995: 133), they are intent on
“push[ing] the master — incarnated in [the State,
Church, Patriarch, etc] — to the point where s(he)
can find the master’s knowledge lacking” (Fink,

103

1995: 134). The hysteric thus retains the trad-
itional answer to the question of place — in that the
subject adopts, what Lacan has described as ‘false
being,’ a fantasy of being which is an image grant-
ed to her through her service to the master’s de-
sire — as well as the traditional answer to the ques-
tion of process — in that the subject has not come
to terms with where her own knowledge or desires
are lacking: “[t]he hysteric maintains the primacy of
subjective division, the contradiction between con-
scious and unconscious, and thus the conflictual,
or self-contradictory, nature of desire itself” (Finks,
1995: 133). The subject has therefore only post-
poned rather than come to terms with the trauma-
tizing effects that result from the inevitable ruptur-
ing of the fragile imaginary ego formation.

The problem of manifest anarchism is further
outlined by Todd May:

[Wjithin the anarchist tradition, the con-
cept of politics and the political field is
wider than it is within either Marxism
or liberalism [...] For Bakunin, the two
fundamental power arrangements to be
struggled against (along with the capital-
ists) were, as his major work indicates,
the state and the church [...] To these
later anarchists have added plant man-
agers, patriarchy and the institution of

104

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marriage, prisons, psychotherapy, and a
myriad of other oppressions (Todd May,

1989: 168-9).

To be sure, there are times when one reads
Bakunin with an eye for the particular manifesta-
tions of his ethics, as in the case of his writings
on the State and Church — “[tjhe Church, on the
authority of all priests and most politicians, is es-
sential to the proper care of the people’s sons; and
the State is indispensable, in their opinion, for the
proper maintenance of peace, order, and justice [...]
[a]nd the doctrinaires of all schools exclaim in chor-
us: ‘without Church or Government, progress and
civilization is impossible’” (Bakunin, 1867/1871).
But there are also times when the latent reading of
the tradition has manifested itself more clearly as a
latent impulse acting through the manifest content
of traditional anarchist texts. As I have written else-
where, sometimes the latent force flashes like light-
ning through the manifest language. We catch a
glimpse of it just long enough to wonder if, beneath
all appearances, there is a secret agent among us.

It should be said that some post-anarchists,
such as Reiner Shurmann and Daniel Colson, have
hitherto conflated the explicit with the implicit,
even where, in select writings, representation and
power are at the centre of the discussion (as in

105

many of Bakunin’s writings). Colson, for instance,
has argued that anarchist subjectivity has always
been distinguished from modem(ist) subjectivity
according such that:

[T]he modem subject is unified, contin-
uous and homogeneous. It exists in just
one form, duplicated by as many copies
as there are individuals. Conversely, the
anarchist subject is multiple, chang-
ing, and heterogeneous. Its forms vary
constantly in size and quality. It is most
often collective even when it is individ-
ual, and regards the individual, in the
commonplace sense, as a largely illu-
sory figure in its many metamorphoses
(Colson, 1996).

Colson’s reading, much like Schurmann’s,
comes from a blending of anarchist ethics with
outside sources including Heidegger, Kierkegaard,
Bruno Latour, etc. In seeking to discover the implied
anarchist impulse inherent to these foreign works he
misattributes the latent anti-authoritarian impulse
of anarchism as the most prominent manifest one
thus obfuscating the distinction between latent and
the manifest. This problem, I believe, has to do
with situating traditional anarchist thought outside
of the confines of modem thought, especially with

106

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regards to its traditional answer to the question
of place and process. Modernity, which is most
accurately understood as a paradigm of thought
to be distinguished from modernism as a counter-
movement in thought, implies that there is also a
modem anarchism and this is the problem Colson
has in his theory. There is a form of anarchism
that responds in various ways to the paradigm
of modernity and then there are those that begin
from the presumptions inherent to the modem
paradigm. Schurmann also erred in his description of
Foucauldian anarchist subjectivity, but in doing so he
described quite well what a meta-ethical framework
derived from latent anarchist desires might actually
begin to look like:

Foucault has constituted himself as an
anarchistic subject in displacing the
boundary lines tacitly taken for granted,
such as between the normal and the
pathological or between innocent and
guilty. His anarchism through discursive
intervention bespeaks what is possible
today, but not what is obligatory; not an
‘ought.’ ‘The search for a form of moral-
ity acceptable by everyone in the sense
that everyone would have to submit to it,
seems catastrophic to me’ (Schurmann,

1985 : 546 ).

107

While the emphasis has been on the individual
as the ethical actor — as Todd May has put it, u [h]
ere lies the a priori of traditional anarchism: trust
in the individual [...] [f]rom its inception, anarch-
ism has founded itself on a faith in the individual
to realize his or her decision-making power morally
and effectually” (May, 1989: 172) — this subjectiv-
ist ethics (which, ironically, May does not end up
endorsing in his book) has come at the price of a
great contradiction:

With anarchism, as we have seen, there is
an essential antithesis between the pure,
uncontaminated place of resistance — con-
stituted by essential human subjectivity
and natural human society — and the place
of power [...] Manichean logic is, therefore,
the logic of place: there must be an essential
place of power and essential place of resist-
ance [...] Can we not see, then, that in an-
archist discourse the state is essential to the
existence of the revolutionary subject, just
as the revolutionary subject is essential to
the existence of the state? [...] The purity
of revolutionary identity is only defined in
contrast to the impurity of political power
(Newman, 2007: 47-8). 11

11 I should say that this is not necessarily true of the “newest social
movements” (Day, 2005).

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the unstable framework

It becomes apparent that the implied place
from which ethics are thought to derive in trad-
itional anarchist philosophy refers also to the ex-
plicit place from which ethics are thought to derive
in much of post-anarchist philosophy — each share
an elaboration of ethics as place and each presup-
pose an ethical rejection of essence or identity as
representation or authority; namely, each reject
ontological essentialism. In this sense, traditional
anarchists understood that, at some level, they were
against power and representati on but rarely di d they
express this outside of the narrow framework of a
limited set of derivatives using the epistemological
and ontological toolkits of the given socio-historical
paradigm. On the other hand, it is within the latent
reading of place in the post-anarchist literature that
a rewriting of the manifest ontology of traditional
anarchism has taken hold: a reconstitution of place
as constitutively empty.

George Bataille’s contribution has been to ex-
tend the latent reading, even while remaining faith-
ful to its potentiality, toward a radical conception of
being as non-being that follows through on what its
philosophy set out to do. Bataille could be no more
explicit on this point, his goal was to describe the
principles of non-place outside of the framework
of the subject through his rewriting of materialist
philosophy. Bataille argued that “[wjhen the word

109

materialism is used, it is time to designate the dir-
ect interpretation, excluding all idealism, of raw
phenomena, and not a system founded on the frag-
mentary elements of an ideological analysis, elab-
orated under the sign of religious relations” (1985:
16). Bataille wanted a materialism that remained
unhinged from all idealistic systems — an indescrib-
able materialism that is always out of grasp, never
revealed in the epistemologies of philosophy. Thus,
through Bataille we not only reject the problem of
ontological essentialism, as we do after the post-
anarchist intervention, but also the problem of
epistemological foundationalism.

It is at the level of process that ethical no-
tions of place become retroactively coded with sig-
nificance. For example, within the latent sphere of
place in post-anarchist philosophy — which is really
nothing other that the ‘post-’ or ‘meta-’ itself — the
latent process of what, for the sake of usefulness,
I will call heterogeneity (a term used by Bataille;
this term will be further elaborated in an upcom-
ing section), is introduced in order to combat the
homogeneity of traditional Manichean subjectivity.
Within the restrictive codes of traditional anarchist
philosophy one finds a latent negative commitment
to combating all forms of power and representa-
tion including the power over mobility locked into
the isolated notion of place. However, manifest

110

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descriptions of place in traditional anarchist phil-
osophy have prefigured a movement of homogen-
eity in the concept of place. Post- anarchists have
corrected this by both implying and enacting the
principle of heterogeneity in various ways and, in
doing so, conforming to the process outlined by
Georges Bataille. In this way both traditional an-
archism and post-anarchism appear to be unbal-
anced meta-ethical discourses (each unbalanced at
opposite ends of the alignment between the axes
of place and process). George Bataille’s philosophy,
on the other hand, achieves a balance and retro-
actively fulfills the latent ethical injunction inherent
in traditional anarchism. Bataille’s philosophy fills
in the obvious missing row in my elaboration of the
relationship between place and process.

Recently, Benjamin Franks has argued that,
within anarchist meta-ethics, there have been com-
peting tendencies between “individualist or ‘philo-
sophical’ anarchisms [which] are often based on
deontological theories, which privilege a discourse
of ‘rights’ and ‘individual autonomy’ [and] social
anarchisms [which] are often either consequential-
ist [...] and thus prioritize good social outcomes — or
prefigurative [...] and as such are more consistent
with practise-based virtue ethics” (2008b: 135). 12

12 In exploring this distinction it appears as though Franks has only
reposed the problematic account of ‘lifestyle versus ‘social anarchism’ that

111

Here, as my preliminary response, there are as yet
two other options: (1) an ethics of base subjectiv-
ism, as opposed to a purely subjectivist model, and
(2) an ethics of base materialism, as opposed to a
purely materialist model. Rather than select the one
over the other — although I maintain that the latter is
the realization of the ethics inherent in the former — I
would like to remain undecided between the two.

“Ethics,” saidJohnD. Caputo, “hands outmaps
which lead us to believe that the roadis finished and
there are superhighways along the way” (Caputo,
1993: 4). I am now tempted to change Caputo’s
line to this: ‘Ethics produces being where there is a
disavowal of non-being, and then hands out discur-
sive maps which lead us to believe that the road to
heaven is finished and that there are superhighways
along the way’. Caputo continued, “Deconstruction
issues a warning that the road ahead is still under
construction, that there is blasting and the danger
of falling rock” (Caputo, 1993: 4): the anarchist
tradition issues a warning that there is no road, only
swamp and a feral human nature. Massimo Pas-
samani, an insurrectionary anarchist, brought this
point home: “In the face of a world that presents
ethics as the space of authority and law, I think that
there is no ethical dimension except in revolt, in

Bob Black has criticized in his book Anarchy After Leftism (1997) and also
in his most recent book Nightmare of Reason (2010).

112

the unstable framework

risk, in the dream” (Passamani, [2010]). Anarch-
ism, as the ethics of the real, rejects the dreams of
imaginary others and in so doing rejects all positive
conceptions of ethics. Post-anarchism is the mani-
festation of a negation that traditional anarchism
set in motion long before. It is the meta-ethics of
traditional anarchism. Post- anarchism is the real-
ization of this meta-ethical rejection of ethical dis-
courses in traditional anarchist philosophy.

In writing this I am brought back to an article
entitled “On Metaethics: A Reverie” (1996) by a
well known meta-ethicist by the name of Francis
Sparshott. Sparshott attributed a Kuhnian relation-
ship to the development of meta-ethical founda-
tions and systems: “a period of confusion [wherein]
normal science [is] displaced by revolutionary sci-
ence, in which one or all of the elements in the old
consensus are rejected in favour of new claimants;
and this revolutionary science, if it succeeds in win-
ning acceptance, hardens into a new paradigm with-
in which a new kind of normal science is established”
(Sparshott, 1996: 35). We may say that traditional
anarchism as a manifest philosophy is the normal
science of anarchism whereas post- anarchism is the
revolutionary science that never settles. Only with
the separation of post- anarchism from classical an-
archism would the possibility of the marriage and

113

settling of post- anarchism into classical anarchism
have been possible. Moreover, only with this subse-
quent marriage of post-anarchism and classical an-
archism is the displacement of the marriage possible
and the inauguration of the new post-anarchism:
post-post-anarchism as post-anarchism.

Sparshott continued, “New and old paradigms
are strictly incommensurable, in that neither accepts
the standards by which the other would condemn it;
but the historical displacement is irreversible, since
the forces that made the revolution succeed as sci-
ence must be real, though neither paradigm can con-
tain them” (Sparshott, 1996: 35). Strictly speaking,
these are the effects of what I have termed anarchy,
the elusive subject matter of anarchist philosophy
after post- anarchism. However, Sparshott’s aim was
to translate the Kuhnian theory into a philosophical
metaphor for novelty: “Public or radical philosophy
attacks whatever may seem to be a pressing intel-
lectual problem without systematic regard for what
philosophy departments are up to — including the
academic conventions about what radical philoso-
phy would be” (Sparshott, 1996: 35). Here I am
tempted to describe post-anarchism as an attack on
the system of knowledge that is at once the ration-
alization of the master’s will from without the acad-
emy and also the imperative of the rationalization
of the master through the production of knowledge

114

the unstable framework

from within the academy. Sparshott’s model consti-
tutes a break from epistemology as such, and it puts
in process a radical system of non-knowledge. The
problem of rationalization constitutes a rejection of
desire as the irrational force of the species, a betray-
al of the fundamental source; any ethical movement
is in the end illusory, a fantasy, just as “a scientific
revolution is in the end successful or illusory, much
as a political revolution finds it has to take over or
replace the extant bureaucracy and somehow do all
or most of what it did” (Sparshott, 1996: 36).

It is in this sense that post-anarchism is ‘in-
surrectionary’ rather than ‘revolutionary.’ By revo-
lutionary, I mean to refer to political revolutions
rather than epistemological revolutions. Stimer
described the difference between insurrection and
revolution:

Revolution and insurrection must not be
looked upon as synonymous. The former
consists in an overturning of conditions,
of the established condition or status, the
State or society, and is accordingly a pol-
itical or social act; the latter has indeed
for its unavoidable consequence a trans-
formation of circumstances, yet does not
start from it but from men’s discontent
with themselves [...] The Revolution
aimed at new arrangements; insurrection

115

leads us no longer to let ourselves be
arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and
sets no glittering hopes on ‘institutions’
(Stimer, 1907).

The problem is the reproduction in still purer
form of the alienation of the species at the hands of
any number of particular manifestations of power.
In serving the academy one risks feeding it with
precisely that which it simultaneously rejects and
internalizes as its sustenance:

Philosophy has no warrant unless it is to
be the ‘pursuit of wisdom’, the constant
rectification of understanding and the
elimination of systematic sources of er-
ror. ‘Normal’ philosophy admits the pos-
sibility of ‘revolutionary’ philosophy not
merely in principle but as its most funda-
mental part; whatever a radical philoso-
phy proposes turns out to be something
the academic discipline has merely put
on hold, rather than rejected. As in most
professions, however, the most deeply
subversive moves are accepted only if
they are made by authorized wi elders of
the paradigm, in a suitable tone of voice
(Sparshott, 1996: 36).

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the unstable framework

In this sense anarchism admits the possibility
of post- anarchism as its most fundamental part and,
moreover, post-anarchism admits the possibility of
post --post- anarchism as its most fundamental part.
In this sense, post- anarchism is anarchism of the
second-order, a rejection of the rationalization of the
master’s will and, subsequently, it is revolutionary
philosophy (or what I have termed ‘insurrectionary’
philosophy): “in its undisguised form [it is] intoler-
able to those vocationally engaged in normal phil-
osophy, because it throws away all the real gains that
reflection has made in a coherent evolutionary his-
tory” (Sparshott, 1996: 36). Post-anarchism, like
radical philosophy, occurs “outside the limited areas
where normal science [or anarchism] is carried on,
[where] a fruitful chaos [still] reigns, where there are
no agreed paradigms” (Sparshott, 1996: 36). Post-
anarchism is therefore the meta- ethics of anarchism
par excellence because it is the home of meta-ethics
itself, the politics that meta- ethics was seeking, just
as meta-ethics is the haven post- anarchist politics
have been attempting to describe for so long. Meta-
ethical philosophy is understood as the calling into
question of the supposed paradigms of normal phil-
osophy without necessarily predicating this on the
grounds of critique (cf., Sparshott, 1996: 38-9).
The promise of post- anarchism is the development
of new ways of thinking about old ideas on the sub-

117

ject of anarchism, recirculating frozen signifiers, let-
ting a little anarchy into the mix.

118

the unstable framework

Post-Anarchism:

A Case for the Centrality of Ethics

This chapter serves to introduce the body of
literature in post-anarchism while highlighting
the latent ethical foundation that it shares with
traditional anarchist philosophy. The former
must be provisionally understood as the return of
anarchist ethics as it is realized in the ethical assault
on ontological essentialism. Post-anarchists, such
as Saul Newman, have argued, in various ways,
that “[tjhe problem of essentialism is the political
problem of our time” (Newman, [2001] 2007: 4).
I have already argued that this is a problem that
begins from within the foundation and system of
meta-ethics, and that essentialism is thus a meta-
ethical position. If these propositions are correct
then it becomes further possible to describe post-
anarchism as the new form of anarchism that
unearths one of the many possible manifestations
of the latent impulse inherent to traditional
anarchist thought. In this sense, post-anarchism
describes what is new about traditional anarchism
today but it does not, at least by this standard
alone, abandon what is old in traditional anarchism.
Post-anarchism must be understood as a discursive
paradigm, that is, as a loose assemblage of (often

119

times contradictory) ethical claims.

Post- anarchism, as a meta-ethical response to
traditional anarchist philosophy, has as its point of
departure one of two non-ethical a prioris: epis-
temological and ontological. Hereafter, we must
distinguish between three points of departure for
anarchist philosophy: epistemological, ontological,
and, finally, meta-ethical (as a strange synthesis
between the former philosophical domains). Thus,
to begin from a place of ethics does not preclude
an epistemological defence of anarchism nor does it
forbid the ontological defence, it merely subsumes
these beneath the meta-ethical a priori. This has
always been the latent, and at times also quite ex-
plicit, preoccupation of traditional anarchist pol-
itical philosophy but the consequence of this pre-
occupation — an attack on essentialism, toward an
embrace of the accidental — has not yet been fully
realized. The significance of its realization has
been discovered before the significance of its dis-
covery has been realized. I will briefly review some
of the literature in order to highlight the differing
philosophical points of departure.

Some post-anarchists, such as Andrew Koch
and Todd May, have argued that any ontological
conception of human nature or community has
authoritarian implications: “[post- anarchism] chal-
lenges the idea that it is possible to create a stable

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post-anarchism

ontological foundation for the creation of universal
statements about human nature [...] claims [that]
have been used to legitimate the exercise of power”
(Koch, [1993] 2011: 24). Interestingly, Koch, here,
implies that what is needed is a relativist discourse.
Todd May has similarly argued that ontologically
rooted conceptions of power in traditional Marx-
ist philosophy (what he called a ‘strategic political
philosophy’; ie, the idea that power emanates from
a central location, operating uni -directionally, to
repress an essentially creative human nature) have
served to legitimize vanguardist interventions into
politics: “if the fundamental site of oppression lies
in the economy [or, as in the case of anarchist phil-
osophy, the state; namely, in any (series of) central
location(s)], it perhaps falls to those who are adept
at economic [or state, etc] analysis to take up the
task of directing the revolution” (May, 2008c: 80).
If we take, as our point of departure, an essential-
ist ontology of the subject, as in humanist philoso-
phy, we “thus undermine at a stroke the subject’s
transparency, voluntarism, and self-constitution”
(May, 2008c: 80) and provide ample philosophical
support for the subject’s constitution by vast appar-
atuses of power. In short, May argued that we fall
back into a crude structuralism as the harbinger of
a form of philosophical determinism. Suffice to say,
May believed that the denial of the subject’s self-

121

constitution is also the promotion of an authoritar-
ian ethical framework. Likewise, if we begin from an
essentialist ontology of the object (the state, patri-
archy, the church, etc), we greatly reduce the politic-
al field and embrace an oppositional relationship of
dependence that mutually constitutes the anarchist
subject and the anarchist object (Newman, 2001:
47-8). Richard J. F. Day has argued that May’s ap-
proach is accurate in its critique (and novel in its
marriage of anarchist and post- structuralist phil-
osophy) but it replaces one problematic philosoph-
ical framework for another equally problematic one
grounded in Habermasian intersubjective rational-
ity: “The fatal problem [...] is that [he] cannot im-
agine how a commitment to fight domination can be
shared without recourse to universal intersubject-
ive reason [...] At worst, it risks falling back into the
Enlightenment humanist trap of responding with
‘reasonable’ and ‘justified’ violence to all who refuse
to play by its rules” (Day, 2001: 26). May’s meta-
ethical framework thereby failed in its insistence on
providing “binding rules of conduct” for the subject
(Day, 2001: 24-6).

Daniel Colson argued that anarchist subjectiv-
ity is at odds with the dominant paradigm (what he
refers to as ‘the modem paradigm’): “The anarch-
ist subject is multiple, changing, and heterogeneous”
(Colson, 1996). At its core, according to Colson, the

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post-anarchism

anarchist subject is anti -authoritarian, resistant to
the universalist and totalizing premises of modernist
ethics. Colson focused on the ontological dimension
by rewiring the cogito ergo sum of traditional anarch-
ist and humanist political philosophy in an important
way, but he did not properly ground this approach
in any meta- ethical framework. Instead he described
an ontological point of departure: the anti -modernist
anarchist subject as some kind of Deleuzian ma-
chine. Likewise, Saul Newman offered a radically
ontological point of departure for post- anarchist re-
jections of ontological essentialism. He described the
anarchist subject as composed of a ‘radical lack’ at
the heart of its being:

This lack or void which constitutes the
subject is not, however, a fullness or es-
sence. It is, on the contrary, an absence,
an emptiness — a radical lack [...] it is a
nonplace that resists essence because it
does not allow a stable identity to arise.

The subject can never form a complete or
full identity (2001: 140-2).

While I do not reject this ontology — indeed
I think it provides an important ingredient for the
type of approach that I am trying to advance — it
does not elaborate the anti -authoritarian ethic as
the primordial condition motivating the anarchist

123

critique of essentialism, and even if it did begin to
sketch out such an ethical system it would inevit-
ably fail because of its a priori rejection of univer-
salism in favour of a crude post-structuralist rela-
tivism. Newman’s ontology did not describe the
motivating conditions that have led to his assault
on traditional conceptions of being and knowledge.
He thereby risks rejecting the traditional anarchist
discourse in its entirety (and, as we shall see, this
ethical component is what constitutes the unique
core of its discourse amongst a chain of political
equivalences). A Lacanian may describe the ethics
as the c factor of anarchist political philosophy. As
Lacan put it, u [i]n the symbolic order, first of all,
one cannot neglect the importance of the c factor
which, as I noted at the Congress of Psychiatry in
1 950, is a constant that is characteristic of a given
cultural milieu” (Lacan, 2006b: 204). In a word,
the c factor describes what is central and consist-
ent to any milieu. In any case, Newman was aware
of this limitation and he pointed toward future re-
search in the area:

While the possibility has been created,
then, for a non-essentialist politics of
resistance to domination, it remains an
empty possibility. If it is to have any pol-
itical currency at all [...] [i]t must have an
ethical framework of some sort — some

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post-anarchism

way of determining what sort of political
action is defensible, and what is not. [...]

Is it possible to free ethics from these
essentialist notions while retaining its
critical value and political currency? This
is the question that the anti -authoritar-
ian program must now address (2001:
160-1).

I believe that Newman was correct, this is the
fundamental question for post-anarchists, and it
is one that has not been adequately addressed by
any of the prominent post- anarchist writers. In-
stead we find an epistemological point of departure
in the work of Andrew Koch ([1993] 2011) and
Todd May (2011), epistemological and ontological
points of departure in the work of Saul Newman
(2009, [2001] 2007, 2004) and an ontological
point of departure in the work of Daniel Colson
(1996), hakim bey (1993) and Reiner Schurmann
(1986, 1985). It will be important to further ex-
press the rejection of epistemological approaches
and to further develop a meta- ethical foundation
for the ontological approaches but before doing so
I must make some mention of the criticism directed
toward post-anarchism as a new discourse on trad-
itional anarchism.

125

New Anarchism and the Reduction
of the Classical Tradition

The new paradigm of anarchist philosophy,
which is what many of us are calling post-anarch-
ism (cf., Evren in Rousselle & Evren, 2011; Call,
2010; Call in Rousselle &Evren, 2011; Call, 2002:
65), is fuelled by an overarching ethical injunction
against the fantasies of representation inherent to
projects built upon positive ontological founda-
tions. The claim must now be made: if anarchist
social philosophy is to remain relevant today, an-
archists will need to embrace that which has his-
torically distinguished their tradition from other so-
cial and political traditions — anarchism has always
been distinguished from other political traditions,
especially Marxist and Liberal (for this argument
see Day, 2005: 14, 127; May, 1994: 57), on the
basis of its commitment to an anti -authoritarian
ethos — in a word, anarchists will need to reconsti-
tute anarchism as an ethical discourse relevant for
the contemporary world by reattaching itself to its
own latent ethical imperative while simultaneously
updating its manifest content in the wake of the
development of post-modem society. Lewis Call,
describing an anarchism suited to the contempor-
ary world, argued that “[i]t is becoming increas-
ingly evident that anarchist politics cannot afford
to remain within the modem world. The politics
126 post-anarchism

of Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin — vibrant and
meaningful, perhaps, to their nineteenth- century
audiences — have become dangerously inaccess-
ible to late twentieth- century readers” (Call, 2002:
117). Anarchist writing must be brought into ac-
cord with the complexities of post-modernism.

I have suggested that post- anarchism presents
a new reading of the traditional anarchist discourse.
The development of a distinctly post-anarchist phil-
osophy was thought to have emerged out of what
David Graeber has called ‘new anarchism’ (Evrenin
Rousselle & Evren, 201 1). Any umbilical cord that
once attached David Graeber (2002) to the term
‘new anarchism’ has now been cut. In an email cor-
respondence, Graeber insisted:

If I end up being considered the source
of something like ‘new anarchism’ (not
even a phrase I made up, it was invented
by the editor of NLR [New Left Review\,
since you never get to make up your own
titles in journals like that), that would be
a total disaster! (Graeber, 2010).

We must rethink the newness of post-anarch-
ism. The supposed newness of post-anarchism has
been put into question for at least three interrelated
reasons: first, there is the problem of the abandon-
ment of traditional anarchist discourse in favour of

127

some redemptive ‘fresh’ and ‘contemporary’ dis-
course — the implication is that traditional anarchist
philosophy is replaced by post-structuralist political
philosophy. This, for example, is probably what Todd
May meant when he argued that “post-structuralist
theory is indeed anarchist [...] It is in fact more con-
sistently anarchist than traditional anarchist theory
has proven to be,” (May, inRousselle &Evren, 2011).
Second, there is the problem of the appearance of
transcendence by the post- anarchist discourse with
respect to the traditional discourse: ‘it is not good
enough that anarchism has been abandoned but
now post-structuralists believe that their discourse
is superior to traditional anarchist discourse!’ Finally,
there is the belief that post-anarchism represents
a ‘newness’ that can not be discovered from within
the traditional discourse as it is read today (as Jesse
Cohn & Shawn Wilbur have argued, in deconstruct-
ive fashion, “[tjhere is almost complete inattention
to the margins of the ‘classical’ texts, not to mention
the margins of the tradition [...] Such ‘minor’ theor-
ists as Gustav Landauer, Voltairine de Cleyre, Josiah
Warren, Emma Goldman, and Paul Goodman, to
name just a few of those excluded, would seem to
merit some consideration, particularly if the project is
a rethinking of ‘normal anarchism’” (Cohn & Wilbur,
2003). Of course, the question must be raised as
to what/whom constitutes the anarchist canon and

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post-anarchism

at which point of exhaustion can one be said to be
representative of such a tradition (I will broach this
question shortly). I shall address these misconcep-
tions throughout this section but for now I will sug-
gest that post- anarchism is merely the contempor-
ary realization of what it was that made traditional
anarchism a unique discursive body and that this is
primarily what constitutes its novelty. Others have
described this new form of anarchism as a “paradigm
shift within anarchism” (Purkis & Bowen, 2004: 5;
also see Evren in Rousselle & Evren, 2011: 4). Can
we at least provisionally admit that anarchism is not
a tradition of canonical thinkers but one of canonical
practices based on a canonical selection of ethical
premises? If this is the case, the paradigm shift that
erupted at the broader level and made its way into
the anarchist discourse, as ‘post-anarchism,’ allowed
for the realization and elucidation of the ethical com-
ponent of traditional anarchist philosophy.

Elsewhere I have argued (as Saint Schmidt,
[2007] 2008) that the critics of post- anarchism
(in particular: Antliff, 2007; Cohn & Wilbur, 2003;
Cohn, 2002; Day, 2005; Franks, 2007; Kuhn,
2009; Sasha K, 2004; Zabalaza, 2003), 13 whether

13 The relationship between critics, proponents, and ambiguous
endorsers of post- anarchism is a complicated one. Critics also
demonstrate support at times and vice versa. There is the further
complication of post-anarchism being a discourse that many adopt
simply by writing from within the current paradigm.

129

by directing their criticism exclusively against post-
anarchism’s prefix (the supposed ‘newness’) or by
directing it toward post-anarchism’s reduction of the
classical anarchist tradition, have pursued problem-
atic lines of critique. With regards to the first man-
oeuvre, the critics have fluctuated between two mu-
tually exclusive arguments, the first of which was that
post-anarchism represented an attempt to rescue
the presumed inadequacies of an increasingly stale
orthodoxy (Cohn & Wilbur, 2003). This critique
focused on the implied claim that post- anarchism
has represented an attempt to abandon classical or
traditional anarchism while at the same time, and
quite ironically, the critique focused on the implied
claim that post- anarchism represented an attempt
to rescue traditional anarchism from its own demise.
The obvious question one should ask to the critics is:
which is it, abandon or rescue ?

With regards to the second manoeuvre, some
critics have interrogated what they saw as the
reductive elements that were found to be at the core
of the post-anarchist narrative. It should be noted
that most of these critiques have aimed squarely
at Saul Newman (and in particular his book
From Bakunin to Lacan, see Newman, 2001)
rather than more broadly at the post- anarchists
as a whole — excluding, for example, the non-

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post-anarchism

Anglophone post-anarchists out of Spain, Germany,
and Turkey (see my interviews with Silreyyya Evren
from Turkey, Jurgen Mumken from Germany,
and Anton Fernandez de Rota from Spain, 2011
in Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies,
called “A Virtual Post-Anarchism Roundtable”).
Therefore, a word of caution is in order: to reduce
post-anarchism to only that which has been
expressed by Saul Newman, or to Anglophone post-
anarchists alone, is to fall victim to precisely the
attitude Newman sought to avoid. There is also the
more obvious problem of reductionism as the very
condition of meta- explorations of the anarchist
tradition. To explore a discourse one must inevitably
trace its contours. This practice is not unusual for
anarchists: as I have claimed in the preface to my
book on post-anarchism, “critics should be made
aware of their own reduction of the post-anarchist
body of thought” (Rousselle in Rousselle & Evren,
2011: viii). Despite all of this, as Silreyyya Evren
has pointed out:

There was an ‘anarchist canon’ which
existed before the post-anarchist at-
tempts at ‘saving’ it. And it seems like an
important task to decode the biases af-
fecting information on what is anarchism,
what represents anarchism, and the an-
archist canon. How do exclusions work

131

within knowledge production processes
on anarchism? What are the structural
assumptions behind the canonization of
anarchism? Most of the known works
on post-anarchism in English, which
were fundamentally disapproved of by
anarchists for misrepresenting anarch-
ism, were in fact taking the given histor-
ies about anarchism for granted. Cliche d
notions of classical anarchism were not
some invention of post-anarchists keen
on building straw-person arguments
from reductions in the traditional canon
and discourse. Instead of accusing some
post- anarchists for employing problem-
atic conceptions of anarchism, I would
like to ask where those conceptions ac-
tually came from in the first place (Evren
in Rousselle & Evren, 201 1: 10-11).

Evren’s argument is that the reduction of
the classical tradition to any number of select
representatives or readings is already there within
the classical texts. That this was the founding for
post-anarchism’s introductory period does not in
any way discount post- anarchism’s further critique
of essentialism and reductionism even while it is
representative of such a tendency.

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post-anarchism

In fact, this tendency continues within the
‘anarchist studies’ milieu itself. In Contemporary
Anarchist Studies : An Introductory Anthology of
Anarchy in the Academy (Amster et ah, 2009),
for example, the editors delineate three forms
of anarchism in the introduction of the book, as
the book’s very foundation: “classical anarchism”
(Amster et al., 2009: 2-4), “1960s- 1970s
anarchism” (Amster et al., 2009: 4), and
“contemporary anarchism” (Amster et al., 2009:
4-5). Why, here, does the reduction of classical
anarchism to a monolithic whole founded within
a particular lineage of time or as the reduction of
classical anarchism to a selection of writers (here,
the usual writers are selected, including Proudhon,
Bakunin and Kropotkin) go unchallenged as
the problematic of contemporary anarchist
studies ? The 196 Os -197 Os version of anarchism
broadened the ethical commitments of anarchists,
according to the introduction of this book, as
they “began fanning out in new [sic?] directions
as a result of theoretical engagements with radical
anti-racism(s) and feminism(s), Situationism
[sic], developments in Marxism, and the like [...]
Anarchists began generating critiques of ‘work’
in and of itself, challenging the assumed logic of
classical working class politics” (Amster et al.,
2009: 4-5). Finally, what the editors describe

133

as “contemporary anarchism”, a post-Seattle
version of anarchism, appears to be another way
of describing “post-anarchism” (perhaps we
may say that anarchists simply have anxieties
over the prefix ‘post-’): “Some anarchists have
continued to develop general critiques of leftism,
formal organization, essentialism, identity politics,
civilization, hierarchy, and capitalism, to take just a
few examples” (Amster et al., 2009: 5). But these
examples, taken together, describe the overarching
tendency of the post- anarchist discourse. Despite
the reduction of classical anarchism and the
anarchist canon, the editors do not question the
critique, made by Gabriel Kuhn, that “much of [the
post-anarchist] critique of of ‘traditional/classical’
anarchism seems to focus on an effigy rather than
a vibrant and diverse historical movement” (Kuhn,
2009: 21). It strikes me that Evren is correct: the
strategy pursued by the post-anarchists was already
there within our anarchist history books — and it will
be long before this problem disappears. This is the
problem that post-anarchism brought into view.

Whatwe ought to take note of is thatthe critics
are themselves suspicious of reductionist and essen-
tialist strategies on the part of the post-anarchists.
Many of the critics have mined the classical trad-
ition for post- anarchistic tendencies without daring
to call this approach post-anarchist. Perhaps the

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post-anarchism

exemplar of this trend is Jesse Cohn who has recent-
ly argued that “anarchists have pretty much always
been interested in and actively theorizing about and
investigating the kinds of things that now get called
‘cultural studies’” (Cohn, n.d.). This approach is
interesting because the discipline that we now call
Cultural Studies is a new construction of the uni-
versity and so what Cohn is expressing is a new way
of reading old traditions. This therefore highlights
the way in which post- anarchists use contemporary
discourse to reinvigorate classical quandaries. In any
case, the traditionalists have therefore only exposed
the extent to which they shared in the defining at-
titude of post-anarchism. Far from a mere overnight
transformation of anarchist priorities and even fur-
ther from a rejection or replacement of traditional
anarchism, post- anarchism has more simply been a
concept used to describe what has always already
been going on within anarchist movement 14 (Purkis
& Bowen, 2004; esp pp. 15-17).

Kuhn, for example, argued that “[tjhere is [a]
difficultly with the postanarchist label, namely the
suggestion that the junctions of anarchism and
post-structuralism/postmodernity as laid out by

14 There is a problem of classifying the anarchist’ assemblage — are
we a movement?, are we a ‘we?’, ‘the’ movement?, a movement of
movements?, a milieu? For this thesis I have opted to use the term
‘anarchist movement’ to signal a relation to the question of process.

135

Newman [...] are new, when, in fact, they are not”
(Kuhn, 2009: 21). What I have argued, is that this
newness is never in fact entirely new sensu stricto
but rather a redefinition of something that was pre-
viously thought unimportant or hidden amongst
the old. It is naive, at best, to argue that the post-
anarchists have moved beyond traditional anarch-
ism. Thus, we may find post- anarchist readings at
the margins of this or that writer but the question
we must ask is one which Siireyyya Evren has al-
ready asked: ‘why now do we find these readings
and not yesterday?’ (Evren, in Rousselle & Evren,
2011: 10-11) and ‘why, after the emergence of
these new readings today, do anarchists continue
to selectively define traditional anarchism accord-
ing to a limited perspective?’ What bothered Kuhn,
it seems, was the audacity of creating a new label
(even while it represents a return to traditional an-
archism) and that Newman dares to call his ap-
proach original when others have in fact already
discovered these lines of flight elsewhere. However,
if the fate of post-anarchism depends exclusively on
the currency of its label, we shall have no fear, for
post-anarchism is nothing other than anarchism
folded back onto itself, and if the anarchist tradition
by some measure demonstrates a desire to reflect
back upon itself with the same amount of effort, we
shall be all the better for it.

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post-anarchism

Post- anarchism describes the slow movement
of this trend during the contemporary period. How-
ever, it is my belief that we will always feel the need
to define a traditional anarchist discourse and an
anarchist discourse that investigates its own trad-
ition — the former is the enactment of anarchism
in the non-anarchist world while the latter is the
enactment of anarchism against itself. Nonethe-
less, there is certainly some truth in Kuhn’s argu-
ment, the German post-anarchist Jurgen Mumken
has agreed: “the different theoretical considerations
(poststructuralist anarchism, postmodern anarch-
ism, etc) that are nowadays summarized as ‘post-
anarchism’ are older than the term itself” (2005:
11). There is thus nothing inherently ‘wrong’ with
Ruth Kinna and Alex Prichard’s call for anarchists
to return to the past rather than to embrace what is
new and what is filtered through the European lens
(2009: 280-9). This is what post-anarchism is
all about, rewriting and rereading the past, finding
things we missed along the way and highlighting
things that we read/wrote wrong for so long. Our
texts, just like our practices (and soon enough we
shall with some confidence add, ‘just like our eth-
ics’) are a system of possibility.

We may say that the critics were mostly re-
sponding to, and vitally a part of, the introductory
period of post- anarchism, as described by Evren:

i37

[W]e tend to see that today’s post-an-
archism is in an introductory period. For
example, all [...] post-anarchist works
operate with an excuse; they behave as
if a justification were needed for bringing
anarchist and post- structuralist philoso-
phy into dialogue with one other. They
explain their motivation for constitut-
ing post-anarchism as a distinct area of
specialization by resorting to their belief
that their area of study is thought to be
irrelevant to both academic and anarchist
circles. Legitimization of a need to iden-
tify with a post-structuralist/postmodem
anarchism is felt to be required before
research is further conducted (Evren, in
Rousselle & Evren, 2011: 12).

This introductory period was marked by an os-
tensibly problematic comparison to Marxist theory.
Evren argued that “they [May, Call, Newman] all
legitimize post- anarchism by first trying to show
that Marxist theory has collapsed or failed or it was
too problematic to rely on [...] This means Marxist
theory was presupposed as the norm, the ground for
comparison” (Evren, in Rousselle & Evren, 2011:
12.). Simon Choat, in agreement with Evren, has
also argued that “[i]f we are to attribute any kind

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post-anarchism

of unity to postanarchism, then we must look to
other factors — one of which, I contend, is a com-
mon opposition to Marxism” (Choat, 2010: 54). I
believe that post-anarchism’s anti-Marxist qualifi-
cation stems from its implied ethical project rather
than its need to define itself apart from another
political discourse. Just as ethical actors reflect on
their second order ethics, anarchists may reflect on
their anarchism from the second order. As I have
argued, anarchism has been to ethics what Marxism
has been to strategy. Perhaps, then, the anti -Marx-
ist sentiment in the introductory period of post-an-
archism is derived not especially from its need for an
opposed tradition upon which to ground and defend
its own but precisely for the expression of its unreal-
ized latent dimension, ethics. How better to qualify
the uniqueness of a project if not by comparing it to
a trend which fundamentally differs from its own?
This does not disqualify the uniqueness of the trad-
ition from which the comparison stems but it does
allow for the realization of the unique core that con-
stitutes each as distinct from all others.

It is the ethical standpoint that has been
repressed by the anarchist tradition (and post-
anarchism we shall say is a return of the repressed).
The anarchist reliance on ethics has the status of an
absurdity, in the Freudian sense, and, truth be told,
occurs as an absurd joke. The nature of this type of

139

joke is revealed in the following punchline:

Two Jews meet in a railway carriage at a
station in Galicia. ‘Where are you travel-
ling?’ asks the one. ‘To Cracow,’ comes
the answer. ‘Look what a liar you are!’
the other protests. ‘When you say you’re
going to Cracow, you want me to be-
lieve that you’re going to Lemberg. But I
know that you’re really going to Cracow.

So why are you lying?’ (Freud, [1905]

2002 : 110 ).

The problematic is thus that the truth is inher-
ent in the performance of the lie: “Is it truth,” asked
Freud (Freud [1905] 2002: 110), “when we de-
scribe things as they are, without bothering about
how our listener will understand what we have said?”
The point here is that the listener, based on previous
encounters with his interlocutor, assumed that his
question would be answered with a lie (from which
he would deduce the truth), and so when he was
told what he actually regarded to be the truth, his
assumption was rendered absurd. Freud was not
arguing for some naive hermeneuticism but rath-
er for the absurd function of the truth inherent to
the lie: “according to the un- contradicted assertion
of the first [Jew], the second one is lying when he
speaks the truth, and speaks the truth by means

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of a lie” (Freud [1905] 2002: 1 11). We may say
that the ethical standpoint of traditional anarchist
philosophy has the absurd status of a joke and con-
stitutes the unique core within which marks its c
factor. Contemporary anarchists have never much
cared to develop their meta- ethical philosophy and
yet they have taken care to describe it as an ethical
one — so, when the anarchists tell us that they are
an ethical tradition, obvious and hackneyed as this
presupposition at once appears, what reason do we
have to take them seriously? It is in this sense that I
call the absurd ethics of anarchism its absent centre:
it is the lie that sustains belief in the stability of the
discourse and the tradition.

As I have argued (and as I will argue in more
depth shortly), there is a presumed consensus
amongst anarchist authors that ‘anarchism is to
ethics what Marxism is to strategy’, but one might
wonder why anarchists have presumed their eth-
ics rather than developed them into a meta-ethical
framework upon which to build their strategy (a
question initially raised by Todd May, 1994: 64).
No doubt, this is important and difficult work — re-
turning to the ethical core of the anarchist tradition
in light of contemporary issues — and very few an-
archists have begun this exploration with any de-
gree of explicitness (although Benjamin Franks is
making real gains in this area; cf., Franks, 2011,

141

2008a, 2008b, and 2007; also see the book An-
archism and Moral Philosophy, Franks & Wilson,
2010), this research is central to our tradition and
yet it remains largely undeveloped: what constitutes
traditional anarchist meta-ethics? It appears at least
that anarchists have simply adopted Petr Kropot-
kin’s meta-ethics as their own — reenacting the dis-
course of ‘mutual aid.’

Kropotkin and the Absent Centre of
Traditional Anarchist Political Philosophy

The claim has been made ad infinitum that
anarchism is principally an ethical tradition. 15 On
this point there have been very few clear responses
to the question of the meta- ethical framework of
traditional anarchist philosophy. Instead, most
responses have tended to assume an ethics of
practice (Berkman, 1929: Chapter 28 et passim\
Franks, 2008a, 2008b; Graeber, 2004; Guerin,
1970; May, 1994: 121-55 et passim). But
anarchists have more often assumed their ethics
rather than developed them into a coherent

15 A few examples, among many, include: Anonymous, 2009; Antliff,
2007; Aragorn!, 2009a, 2009b; Berkman, 1929: Chapter 28 et passim;
Bookchin, 2006; Bookchin, 1998; Bookchin, 1994; Bookchin, 1987: 129;
Call, 2007; Critchley, [2007] 2008: 93, 125; Critchley, n.d.: 24; Franks,

2011; Graeber, 2004: 5, 12, 14, 49; Graeber, 2007: 254; Grubacic & Graeber,
2004; Kropotkin, 1922, 1910, 1902; Rocker, 2009; Tucker, 1973.

post-anarchism

142

foundation and system (May, 1994: 64), and thus,
as I shall try to show, they have a real debt to pay to
the late nineteenth century writings of the Russian
anarchist Petr Kropotkin.

The anarchist author Herbert Read has argued
that, with Kropotkin, u [n]o better history of eth-
ics has ever been written” (as cited in Woodcock
& Avakumovic, 1971: 420). Kropotkin, whom we
may say is the originator and exemplar of the trend
in practical ethics, has described an ethics of ‘mu-
tual aid’ as the general condition and organization
of the survival of the species. According to Kropot-
kin, there can be discovered, beneath the destruc-
tive manifest structure of the state, an organization
of life that ought to be allowed to blossom or, at the
very least, to be mirrored or protected. This form
of naturalism ostensibly “removes ethics from the
sphere of the speculative and metaphysical, and
brings human conduct and ethical teaching back
to its natural environment: the ethical practices of
men in their everyday concerns” (see the “Transla-
tor’s Preface” in Kropotkin, 1922). It has proved
important to the development of an exclusive con-
ception of ethics as practical, positive, and orderly
within traditional anarchist discourse. Kropotkin’s
influence is far reaching and his ideas have cast a
long impregnable shadow over traditional anarchist
discourse. Might I suggest, as Lacan has done with

143

his work on ‘Kant avec Sade’, that Kropotkin’s work
may be read as the moral injunction which allows
for a Stimerian moment to occur in anarchist phil-
osophy?: Kropotkin avec Stimer.

Two fundamental questions were to be ad-
dressed by Kropotkin in his Ethics and, for this rea-
son, his book was to be subdivided into two parts ac-
cordingly (see “Introduction by the Russian Editor,”
in Kropotkin, 1922). He proposed first to respond
to the question of place — his central question was
“whence originate man’s moral conceptions?” (Kro-
potkin, 1922) — and this motivated the writing of
his first volume before his death. Kropotkin urged
his readers “to consider the question of the origin
and the historical development of morality” (Kro-
potkin, 1922). This latter question, on the historical
development of morality, related to the question of
process — his central question was “[wjhatis the goal
of the moral prescriptions and standards?” (Kropot-
kin, 1922) — and was the motivation for his attempt
at writing a second volume. This final book would go
unwritten. We are informed by the Russian Editor
that “Kropotkin planned to devote [his final book to]
the exposition of the bases of realistic ethics, and its
aims” and that he wanted to produce a book that
would engage with the popular radical philosophies
of his time (Kropotkin, 1922). Unfortunately, this
venture was interrupted by his death.

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Kropotkin posited a universal foundation,
discoverable through the empirical method, as
the basis for the moral life of the species. The
problematic of positive meta-ethics in his work thus
appears across two main registers: first, there is the
overarching problem of universalism, and; second,
there is the problem of empiricism. The former
problem reveals an answer to the question of place
while the latter reveals an answer to the problem
of process. If, in continuing through my argument,
Kropotkin’s ethics have been the absent centre of
traditional anarchist discourse, then it will be shown
that this does not necessarily mean that Kropotkin’s
ethics were universal and/or empirical in their
latent determinations. Just as my approach rejects
the subjectivist reduction of truth to the ethical
subject, I also reject the manifest truth apparent in
hermeneutical readings of ethical texts. There are at
least two ways to respond (and these responses are
not mutually exclusive) to Kropotkin’s ethics today:
one may reject Kropotkin’s manifest ethics and/or
one may reconstruct Kropotkin’s ethical writings
by revealing their latent determinations. The latter
approach involves the former. I shall pursue the
latter ‘post-Kropotkinian’ path in accordance with
the latent reading of the anarchist tradition that I
have been unearthing until this point.

John Slatter has argued that Kropotkin’s work,

i45

especially his “La Morale Anarchiste” (written in
1 890, hereafter referred to as “Anarchist Morality”),
was “principally [...] a ferocious attack on existing
moral systems, all of which are seen as essentially
self-serving justifications for the existing distribution
of power and wealth” (Slatter, 1996: 261). There
is thus room to suggest that Kropotkin’s work now
reveals a latent dimension as well as a traditional
manifest dimension. If it can be demonstrated that
Kropotkin’s system of ‘mutual aid’ also called for the
restriction of the free movement of the individual
then it can also be argued that his work, like much of
traditional anarchist philosophy, was always at war
with itself. Slatter took Kropotkin at his word when
he argued that “[anarchists must] bend the knee to no
authority whatsoever, however respected [...] accept
no principle so long as it is unestablished by reason”
(Kropotkin as quoted in Slatter, 1996: 261). Here,
however, Kropotkin’s rationalism was maintained but
only to reveal a useful parallel: “The appeal to reason
rather than to tradition or custom in moral matters
is one made earlier in Russian intellectual history
by the so-called ‘nihilists’” (Slatter, 1996: 261).
Like Kropotkin, the Russian ‘nihilists’ (or “The New
People”, as they were called) 16 adopted a rationalist/
positivist discourse as a way to achieve a distance

16 Thanks to Aragorn! for bringing me up to speed on the history of
the Russian nihilists.

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from the authority of the church and consequently
from metaphysical philosophies. The meta- ethics
of Kropotkin’s work (note: not his first order ethics)
thus reveals, not ‘mutual aid,’ but a tireless negativity
akin to the spirit of the Russian nihilists: “[according
to Kropotkin, the anarchist must] fight against
existing society with its upside-down morality and
look forward to the day when it would be no more”
(Kropotkin as cited by Slatter, 1996: 261).

The epitome of this post-Kropotkinian gesture
is perhaps Allan Antliff’s reading of Kropotkin’s
meta-ethics. According to Antliff, Emma Goldman
(whom Hilton Bertalan has considered one of the
foremost post-anarchists; cf., his essay “Emma
Goldman and ‘Post-anarchism’” in Rousselle & Ev-
ren, 2011: 208-30) “counted [...] Kropotkin [...]
among her most important influences, so it is ap-
propriate we turn to him for further insight” (Ant-
liff, 2007; also in Rousselle & Evren, 2011: 161).
However, given this, we must wonder to what extent
the Kropotkinian influence in her whting allowed
for the Stimerian/Nietzschean tendency and vice
versa — which side of the divide can we truly pos-
ition her, for it is difficult to consolidate views unless
we choose the Stimerian pole: the Stimerian pole
does not necessarily reject the usefulness of first or-
der ethics to the ego, but the Kropotkinian pole does
not allow for the autonomy of the ego. One can be

147

a subjectivist and sacrifice oneself to any number of
moral systems but the reverse does not hold.

The source of Kropotkin’s meta-ethics, accord-
ing to Antliff, is “the libertarian refusal to ‘model
individuals according to an abstract idea’ or ‘muti-
late them by religion, law or government’ [and thus
allowing] for a specifically anarchist type of morality
to flourish” (Antliff, in Rousselle & Evren, 2011:
161). Antliff therefore reads beyond the restrictive
interpretation of Kropotkin’s manifest ethics and
finds something buried beneath the fabric. For in-
stance, the revolt against the ‘abstract idea’ was
similar to the revolt against abstract moral systems
in Stimer’s work (cf., Newman, 2004c). What is
more is that there is a tangential reference to spe-
cifically nihilist forms of ethics in Antliff’s essay:
“his morality entailed the unceasing interrogation of
existing social norms, in recognition that morals are
social constructs, and that there are no absolutes
guiding ethical behavior” (Antliff, in Rousselle &
Evren, 2011: 161). Interestingly, Antliff views this
as Kropotkin’s Nietzschean side (ibid.). Might we
consider Goldman, then, a post- anarchist proper in
that she chose the Stimerian dimension in order to
consolidate her views on Kropotkin’s ethics?

There is yet more evidence provided for a post-
Kropotkinian interpretation. The Russian editor of
Kropotkin’s Ethics has argued:

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Many expect that Kropotkin’s Ethics will
be some sort of specifically ‘revolution-
ary’ or ‘anarchist’ ethics, etc Whenever
this subject was broached to Kropotkin
himself, he invariably answered that his
intention was to write a purely human
ethics (sometimes he used the expres-
sion ‘realistic’) (italics in original; “Intro-
duction by the Russian Editor,” in Kro-
potkin, 1922).

We should fully consider this distinction be-
tween ‘human’ ethics and ‘anarchist’ ethics — de-
spite that we are often led by anarchists to believe
that Kropotkin’s ethics were ‘anarchist,’ are we not
now to believe that Kropotkin was primarily con-
cerned with outlining an ethical system that re-
sponded to the dominant non-religious philosophy
of the time. Kropotkin’s ethics were a humanist eth-
ics of evolution (mutual aid, we were told, is a factor
of evolution) but these ethics ought not be reduced
to this exclusive interpretation. In keeping with the
post-Kropotkinian framework, Jesse Cohn & Shawn
Wilbur (2003), and Benjamin Franks (2008a),
have suggested, in each their own way, that Kropot-
kin’s work on ethics was an attempt to “open up a
space for benevolent social action against the real-
ism of conservative social Darwinists, who held that

149

the battle for survival determined all social behavior”
(Franks, 2008a: n.p.). Brian Morris, whom has been
considered a foremost scholar on Kropotkin, also
supported this view and has argued that: “Darwin’s
evolutionary naturalism form[ed] the basis and the
inspiration of Kropotkin’s own ethical theory” (Mor-
ris, 2002: 427). In this sense, Kropotkin was not
so much overturning the Darwinian current of his
time but rather reformulating it into a more anarch-
istic worldview — he was negating what he felt to be
the authoritarian dimension of Darwin’s thesis (the
competition model). Thus, if one intends to work
from within Kropotkin’s work (whatever its limita-
tions), as in ^o^-Kropotkinist meta-ethics, rather
than to abandon his premise in full, one can per-
haps begin by reinterpreting the concept ‘sociality’
as it was used by Kropotkin. Morris has made great
advancements in this area:

[“Sociality,” in Kropotkin’s writings,]
did not imply that human nature and
human subjectivity expressed or were
manifest of some unchanging ‘essence’.
Indeed, the conflation, by postmodern-
ist scholars, of human ‘nature’ as ex-
pressed in evolutionary theorists like
Kropotkin, with the metaphysics of Pla-
to and his concept of ‘essence’ (Eidos)
is quite fallacious. For Kropotkin as for

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contemporary evolutionists [...] humans
are characterized not by some eternal,
supra-natural Platonic essence (benign
or otherwise) but by an evolving human
nature that exhibits increasing levels of
both sociality and individuality (Morris,
2002 : 431 ).

The redefinition of ‘sociality’ brings ethics into
the domain of sociology and cultural studies but it
does not necessarily remove speculation from the
domain of the empirical sciences. For this reason
Morris’s reinterpretation remains tied exclusively to
the manifest content. Morris’s interpretation finds
Kropotkin to be a blatant empiricist. Any future
interpretation will have to find inventive new strat-
egies for overcoming the problem of empiricism in
Kropotkin’s work. In any case, the problem of the
reduction of Kropotkin’s metaphysics to humanism
is concomitant with the problem of the reduction of
science to empiricism, as Lacanians have been fond
of pointing out. One might therefore find that Kro-
potkin’s scientism was a much stronger voice than
his empiricism. The empirical sciences operate from
within the imaginary order and therefore encourage
manifest imaginaries such as the benign human be-
ing, while constituting this as a gross reduction of
truth. As Dylan Evans has put it:

151

Lacan has a Cartesian mistrust of the im-
agination as a cognitive tool. He insists,
like Descartes, on the supremacy of pure
intellection, without dependence on im-
ages, as the only way of arriving at cer-
tain knowledge. [...] This mistrust of the
imagination and the sense puts Lacan
firmly on the side of rationalism rather
than empiricism (Evans, 1996: 85).

The problem of Kropotkinian ethics should
therefore be layered upon a higher order of abstrac-
tion. We may say that our post-Kropotkinian read-
ing provides us with a vantage that Kropotkin’s me-
ta-ethics were not necessarily about humanism nor
were they necessarily about empiricism — these were
merely strategies adopted against a highly suspect
and rapidly emerging paradigm of thought. Kropot-
kin’s adoption of empiricism was strictly a means
to distance himself, through science, from religious
authority. Morris described what I have termed Kro-
potkin’s meta-ethics (or, if you like, latent ethics):
“As an evolutionary naturalist, Kropotkin took it for
granted that moral concepts were extremely varied
and were continually developing” (Evans, 1996:
428). Morris’s reading of Kropotkin is that his eth-
ics were to some extent flexible and open to con-
tingency. Morris continued, “Kropotkin never saw

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moral principles as conveying absolute truths, only
as ‘guides’ to help us to live an ethical life” (Evans,
1996: 437). In this sense, whether as guides or as
metaphors, Kropotkin’s meta-ethics reveals an at-
tack on all moral principles which finally frees the
unique individual to live an ethical life. There is
reason to believe that Kropotkin’s ethics oscillated
between two moments of truth: on the one hand he
felt compelled to respond, reform, and/or revolu-
tionize the dominant paradigm of the time and this
was his first order ethics (a performance of his latter
meta- ethical system), and on the other hand he felt
compelled to underline that his manifest ethics were
not set in stone, that they were merely an enactment
of a certain passion for the negative.

It is therefore a safe conclusion to insist that
Kropotkin’s manifest ethics should not necessarily
be reduced to the anarchist ethic for at least three
reasons: first, Kropotkin himself argued that his
work on ethics was ‘humanist’ rather than ‘anarch-
ist’ and this distinction can be read within the spec-
trum of the latent/manifest distinction rather than
the banal interpretation of anarchist ethics as the
realization of what makes us ‘human.’ Second, Kro-
potkin’s ethics are a product of the time and context
in which Darwin’s competition thesis was gaining a
foothold. In this respect, Franks (2011) has claimed
that “rationalist, naturalist and to a lesser extent in-

153

tuitionist, responses were adopted by classical an-
archists [...] because they provided an alternative to
the hierarchical and statist moral teachings justified
by the church.” Finally, given my second claim that
Kropotkin’s ethics were situated uniquely within a
context, Kropotkin’s ethics were only one possible
manifestation of an attack on the authoritarian
foundations and systems that have been influencing
society — other anarchist attacks were also present
during this paradigm, including, for example, the
inventive meta-ethics of Max Stimer (whose work
Kropotkin alludes to several times in his Ethics).

Yet we know very well that specifically anarch-
ist ethics were once a concern for Kropotkin — at
least while writing and publishing the individual
chapters for his book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evo-
lution (1902), a time when, before publishing in
book form, he was happy to call his approach an
anarchist one. In one such essay, “Anarchist Mor-
ality” (1897) he began to describe an apt under-
standing of latent ethics that ought not necessarily
be reduced to the remainder of the text:

The history of human thought recalls
the swinging of a pendulum which takes
centuries to swing. After a long period of
slumber comes a moment of awaken-
ing. Then thought frees herself from the
chains with which those interested — rul-

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ers, lawyers, clerics [dare we say, moral-
ists?] — have carefully enwound her. She
shatters the chains. She subjects to se-
vere criticism all that has been taught to
her, and lays bare the emptiness of the
religious, political, legal, and social preju-
dices amid which she has vegetated. She
starts research in new paths, enriches our
knowledge with new discoveries, creates
new sciences (Kropotkin, 1897).

However, this reading is opposed to Kropot-
kin’s own view that “did not recognize any separ-
ate ethics; he [Kropotkin] held that ethics should be
one and the same for all men” (Kropotkin, 1897).
Kropotkin’s latent nihilist meta-ethics thereby came
into conflict with his manifest universalist eth-
ics. Kropotkin did not want to adopt the subjectiv-
ist/relativist response to the question of process in
meta-ethics. But we have learned from the post-
anarchists that the universal discourse is rather a
particular discourse inscribed as hegemonic, and
so, with this in mind, Kropotkin perhaps had greater
ambitions in mind than simply the egoist pursuit of
happiness: he wanted to subvert the dominant para-
digm in full, replacing it with a softer, more anarch-
istic, ethic that was fuelled by the negative impulse.
The trajectory of anarchist philosophy de-

i55

mands that we continue through this Kropotkinian
movement and envision it as a particular embodi-
ment of a wider tendency. Anarchist ethics, guided
by its meta-ethical core, also demands that we rec-
ognize Kropotkin’s ethics as one node in a histor-
ical lineage of struggle rather than as the node upon
which all of our tradition is supported, even if this
node is unstable and destined to failure. During fu-
ture meta-ethical readings of Kropotkin’s ethics we
must be guided by the following question: what is
the source of his anarchist morality? This question,
I believe, reveals answers that are much more inter-
esting than Kropotkin’s intended line of investiga-
tion (ie, ‘what is the source of human morality?’).
Here, the confusion is with the latent impulse of his
writing within the lineage of anarchist thought and
the manifest morality consigned to his name.

It is worth highlighting the authoritarian di-
mension of Kropotkin’s manifest ethics, because
Kropotkin has asked the unique individual to sac-
rifice herself, her very being, to the binding rules
of conduct in the principle of ‘mutual aid.’ Meta-
ethical critiques of his work, stemming as early as
1925, have focused on Kropotkin’s essentialism
and his disregard for the freedom of the individ-
ual. George Boas’s critique is perhaps the (earliest)
exemplar of this trend: “[Kropotkin] is more inter-
ested in the species than in the individual. Mutual

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aid, justice, self-sacrifice are, by definition, of value
largely to the race. They may even prove the annihi-
lation of the individual” (Boas, 1925: 245). Boas
continued to highlight the essentialism inherent to
Kropotkin’s work, “[i]t is important to read [Kropot-
kin’s Ethics\ if only to see how it casts in high re-
lief that pathetic faith in human beings and nature
which sweetened the lives of our fathers” (Boas,
1925: 248). Boas even went so far as to argue that
Kropotkin’s work ignored the latent dimension of
man [sic] as a creature who is by nature entered
into a social relationship to an ‘other’ within him-
self (in the Kierkegaardi an/Freudian sense of an
unconscious) (Boas, 1925: 248). Boas’s early cri-
tique is instructive but it does not follow through on
its own premise: Boas failed to highlight what ap-
peared within the unconscious of Kropotkin’s writ-
ing, he restricted his reading to an objective truth,
to ‘symptom.’ In doing so, Boas and others have
produced inadequate accounts of Kropotkin’s work.
What follows is the revealing of this problematic
reading as an account of the manifest text. We
shall see that Kropotkin’s ethical notion of sacrifice
is quite different from the meta-ethical notion of
sacrifice found in the writings of Georges Bataille.

Kropotkin argued, in “Anarchist Morality”
(1897), that what “mankind admires in a truly
moral man is his energy, the exuberance of life

i57

which urges him to give his intelligence, his feeling,
his action, asking nothing in return” (Kropotkin,
1897). This is certainly an ethical response (to give
‘without return’ from the pit of one’s being) and yet
the authoritarian dimension of Kropotkin’s impera-
tive — epitomized, in some ways, in the Levinasian
“ethics of responsibility” (cf., Zizek, 2005) — is re-
vealed in the notion of self-sacrifice. How else to
instigate anarchist morality if not by force and co-
ercion, if not by self-repression and self-sacrifice?
For, on the one hand, the Stimerian egoist sacrifices
things which she owns, but she does not thereby
sacrifice her ‘ownness’: as Stimerputit:

I can deny myself numberless things for
the enhancement of his pleasure, and
I can hazard for him what without him
was the dearest to me, my life, my wel-
fare, my freedom [...] Why, it constitutes
my pleasure and my happiness to re-
fresh myself with his happiness and his
pleasure [...] But myself, my own self I
do not sacrifice to him, but remain an
egoist and — enjoy him (Stimer, 1907).

The Kropotkinian mutualist sacrifices her
‘ownness’ in exchange for her freedom just as
the academic sacrifices her being in exchange
for her knowledge, and if she does not do this

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post-anarchism

she is thought to be a “monster” (cf., Kropotkin,
1922), to be the ‘un-man.’ 17 The problem with
the essentialist foundation, just as the problem
with the foundationalist process, is the problem of
the inability to contain this wasteful excrement —
the negative that bursts out of all attempts to
conceal it in knowledge. But there is also the
logical problematic of altruism as outlined by
John L. Mackie: “[selflessness] takes the form of
what Broad called self-referential altruism — not
for others, but for others who have some special
connection with oneself; children, parents, friends,
workmates, neighbours in the literally, not the
metaphorically extended, sense [...jltismuch easier,
and commoner, to display a self-sacrificing love for
some of one’s fellow men if one can combine this
with hostility to others” (Mackie, 1977: 132).

In “The One Where Phoebe Hates PBS,” a
Friends episode, Phoebe raises the question: is
there such a thing as a truly selfless act? Phoebe
believes that there are selfless acts, and so she
lets a bee sting her ‘so that the bee can look cool
to his bee friends.’ Unfortunately, the bee died
soon after stinging Phoebe. According to Mackie,

17 As Stirner has put it: “Liberalism as a whole has a deadly enemy,
an invincible opposite, as God has the devil: by the side of man stands
always the un-man, the individual, the egoist. State, society, humanity, do
not master this devil” (1907).

159

altruism, self-sacrifice in favour of the other, may
always be rendered a selfish act — but not the other
way around. Paradoxically, every time we act in the
name of an other, somewhere a little bee dies.

Kropotkin’s manifest anarchist ethics can
therefore only be implemented by way of the ethical
imperative; to be sure, an ethical imperative that is
sustained by the explosive selfishness of unique in-
dividuals. But one does not freely sacrifice, according
to Kropotkin: one must freely sacrifice. Conversely,
may we now say that the ethical sacrifice, accord-
ing to nihilist meta-ethics, is the one that does not
go philosophized? Is the ethical subject the one
that does not truly sacrifice herself to knowledge as
the rationalization and justification of state? Is the
sacrifice the one that does not get codified into the
laws of the symbolic order (a veritable ‘ethics of the
real’)? According to Kropotkin, ethical acts are “ex-
pressed through altruism and self-sacrifice” (Mor-
ris, 2002: 425) and this attitude was “exemplified
in the impulse of a person who plunges into a river
to save another person from drowning, and with-
out any thought of personal safety or reward” (ibid.,
432). The veiled authoritarianism of this logic,
when it is converted from the realm of descriptive
ethics to prescriptive ethics, as it inevitably will be
(and has been), is revealed in the metaphorical slave
who renounces her own life in order to make the life

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post-anarchism

of the other that much wealthier. In Morris’s article
on Kropotkin’s ethics, he writes: “He [Kropotkin]
was not therefore concerned with semantics, with
the meaning of moral concepts, issues which fas-
cinate contemporary philosophers leading them to
emphasize what is clearly self-evident, namely that
moral judgements are prescriptive, giving rise to
ethical theory or prescriptivism” (italics in original;
2002: 425). The point to be taken here is that Mor-
ris, in his endorsement of Kropotkin, and critique
of semantic meta-ethical philosophers, confesses
a fundamental truth of naturalism: the descriptive
inevitably collapses into the prescriptive. Phillips
has likewise argued that “Kropotkin transfers his
naturalistic observations into a prescription for hu-
man society” (2003: 143), and so my thesis here
is not unfounded. What is more, Phillips suggests
that “Kropotkin’s naturalism, like that of the so-
cial Darwinists, lies not in describing nature, but in
creating a metaphor for guiding human behaviour”
(ibid.). This is the problem with the prescriptive ex-
trapolation. The problem of this descriptivism is the
reduction of the accidental attributes of the species:
our species does not just go to war, nor does the
species just give themselves away; we also shit and
piss, masturbate and fuck, ... , and, in the end, the
future of our species remains unwritten because the
ethical logic that propels us continues also to fail us.

161

Despite the problems inherent to Kropotkin’s
manifest ethics, his work continues to influence
anarchist philosophy today. One has only to research
the most recent lineage of anarchist publications to
glean this influence. Colin Ward’s book Anarchy
in Action began with the following provocation:
How would you feel if you discovered
that the society in which you would
really like to live was already here, apart
from a few little, local difficulties like
exploitation, war, dictatorship and star-
vation? [...] [A]n anarchist society, a so-
ciety which organises itself without au-
thority, is always in existence, like a seed
beneath the snow [...] [Ajnarchism [is]
the actualisation and reconstitution of
something that has always been present,
which exists alongside the state, albeit
buried and laid waste (Ward, 1973: 11).

Ward’s provocation was steepedinthe rhetoric
of universal naturalism and it owed a great debt to
Kropotkin’s ethics. Ward continued this underlying
motif until his last interview (entitled “The practice
of liberty”) before his death (cf., Ward, 2010).

Similarly, Uri Gordon, in his book Anarchy
Alive!: Anti -authoritarian Politics from Practice
to Theory (2008), described anarchism as a living

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post-anarchism

force in the world that can be located in everyday
grassroots activism. His critique of post- anarchism
was that it has no ‘practical’ relevance for contem-
porary anarchism: “It should be emphasized that
post-structuralist anarchism remains an intellectual
preoccupation limited to a handful of writers rather
than being a genuine expression of, or influence on,
the grassroots thinking and discourse of masses of
activists” (Gordon, 2008: 42-3). One is tempted to
raise the question of the significance of intellectual
preoccupations — what does this mean? Could it not
be argued that Gordon’s book was also chiefly an in-
tellectual preoccupation? If Gordon meant to suggest
(as I believe he did) that post-anarchism does not
speak to or influence grassroots thinking, this pre-
sumes that grassroots thinking is important (a claim
that would have to be substantiated or elaborated for
clarification). 18 On the other hand, we have seen that
this claim is unsubstantiated and that post- anarch-
ists have written about these points (for a review of
this literature see Siireyyya Evren’s “Introduction” in
Rousselle &Evren, 201 1). Spontaneously, anumber
of post- anarchist responses come to mind: Richard
J. F. Day’s attempt to describe the post- anarchism
of the ‘newest social movements’, Tadzio Muel-
ler’s attempt to define a post- structuralist counter/

18 It is to no great surprise that the book has been described as “a
user’s manual for anarchist activism” (Prichard, 2008).

163

anti -hegemony, and Anton Fernandez de Rota’s his-
tory of post-modem anarchist social movements all
seem to respond in major ways to this point. How-
ever, there is a side to Gordon’s writing that I am
less prone to reject: if, as I have been trying to claim,
much of contemporary anarchism A post- anarchism
then it would follow that Gordon’s book is also post-
anarchistic. This explains the relevance of the chap-
ter in Gordon’s book, called “Anarchism Reloaded,”
that reflects a key post-anarchist attribute: the bring-
ing into question of traditional anarchist philosophy.
It is with some irony that the Spanish post- anarchist
Anton Femendez de Rota has also written an es-
say by the same name (cf., Femendez de Rota, in
Rousselle & Evren, 2011). We have also described
the third section of our Post-Anarchism: A Reader
volume as “Classical Anarchism Reloaded.” Gordon
explained: “[ajnarchist ideas are constantlyreframed
and recoded in response to world events, politic-
al alliances and trends” (Gordon, 2008: 28), and
this chapter of his book aimed to describe “trends
and developments in social movement activity over
recent decades that have led to the revival and re-
definition of anarchism in its present form” (Gordon,
2008: 29). He may try to wiggle his way out of this
one, but Uri Gordon is a post-anarchist.

However, there are further problems with
the reduction of anarchism to ‘activist’ ‘social

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post-anarchism

movement(s)’. Aragom! has argued that “[n]ot only
are movement politics an explicitly European con-
struction (with all that that implies) but the belief
that as the result of some specific victory (even if that
victory is at the end of a long campaign) [that] we
will get a world that reflects our values is utopian at
best” (Aragom!, n.d.). For similar reasons Richard
J.F. Day has argued that the anarchist currents of the
‘newest’ social movements are “not what sociologists
would call social movements at all [...] Thus there is
a certain irony in my use of this term, an irony that is
intended to highlight the shift away from hegemonic-
ally oriented ‘movements’” (Day, 2005: 8). Finally,
in a widely contentious article entitled “Give Up
Activism,” Andrew X has argued that “ [historically,
those social movements that have come the closest
to de- stabilising or removing or going beyond cap-
italism have not at all taken the form of activism. Ac-
tivism is essentially a political form and a method of
operating suited to liberal reformism [...] The activist
role in itself must be problematic for those who de-
sire social revolution” (Andrew X, n.d.). In Gordon’s
work, the problem is not the content of the presup-
position but that the presupposition that has gone
undeveloped and has been assumed: that grassroots
activism is what anarchism is all about.

Peter Gelderloos’s Anarchy Works (2010)
took “examples from around the world, picking

165

through history and anthropology, showing that
people have, in different ways and at different times,
demonstrated mutual aid, self-organization, auton-
omy, horizontal decision making, and so forth — the
principles that anarchy is founded on” (Little Black
Cart, 2010). Similarly, Richard Day’s Gramsci
is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social
Movements aimed to describe the practices of the
newest social movements that “open up new pos-
sibilities for radical social change that cannot be im-
agined from within existing paradigms,” these new
possibilities come about through “an orientation to
direct action and the construction of alternatives to
state and corporate forms” (Day, 2005: 18). Day’s
post- anarchism does not necessarily lead to a Kro-
potkinian ethos but it certainly, through its empir-
ical ‘from practice to theory’ approach to writing,
lends itself to this interpretation even while osten-
sibly reacting against it. And, to provide one more
example, the lead singer of the band Bad Religion,
Greg Graffin, has published a new book called An-
archy Evolution (2010) that takes a naturalist pos-
ition against Darwinist and theological accounts of
the development of the human species.

Also, Purkis & Bowen, in their edited collection
Changing Anarchism (2004), wrote that their “in-
tention has been to draw upon a number of valu-
able pointers that exist in the work of the classical

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post-anarchism

anarchists, as well as a number of its enduring prin-
ciples, and to frame them in new ways” (Purkis &
Bowen, 2004: 6). Undoubtedly, this makes their
work firmly within the paradigm of post-anarchism
but it nonetheless carries with it certain baggage:
“Even though Kropotkin’s views of human nature
as being naturally benign and co-operative might
struggle to stand the test of time [...] there are still
some grounds for claiming that Kropotkin is the
‘classical anarchist’ most worthy of continual atten-
tion” (Purkis & Bowen, 2004: 7). The concern for
anarchists is that if they do away with Kropotkin’s
canonical work (particularly the obvious interpreta-
tion of his work), they will be confronted with the
question that anarchists have consistently put to
the side, a question that has been the absent centre
of their political philosophy — perhaps, they will no
longer be able to ignore the imaginary meta-ethical
framework that has provided the lynchpin to their
discourse. To bring my point to a close, we can see
that Kropotkin’s influence remains, as an opposing
current, even within the post- anarchist discourse.

We may thus describe post- anarchism as a dis-
course, among others, that has risen to the surface
within the last 25 years. Post- anarchism is simply a
concept we have used to describe this radical current.
In his introduction to the anthology New Perspectives
on Anarchism (2010), Todd May has argued: “[w]

167

hether as a mode of organizing resistance, as a model
for interpersonal relationships, or a way of thinking
about politics specifically and our world more gen-
erally, anarchist thought has once again become
a touchstone [...] One might want to call this the
third wave, after the wave of the late 1 800s to early
1900s and the anarchist inflections of the 1960s”
(May, 2010: 1). But can we not think of contem-
porary anarchist thought as being in a relationship to
some notion of an ‘outside’ (the poles of which will
be explained momentarily) rather than as the organ-
ization of resistance, personal relationships and pol-
itics within prepackaged slots of history? Third wave
anarchism refers also, therefore, to post- anarchism —
post- anarchism is third-wave anarchism.

I believe that I may be permitted the minor
reduction of describing the discourse surrounding
anarchist ethics as Kropotkinian and the actual
‘always already’ existing negative force of anarchy
as the latent ethics within this discourse. We have
therefore to distinguish between ‘discourse ethics’
and its opposite: the ethical disruption of discourse.
Anarchists continue to appropriate Kropotkin’s
ethics, even where they misinterpret his ethics for
his meta-ethics. This shorthand relieves anarchists
of the difficult work of having to explain or explore
their own relationship to ethical discourse. As Todd
May as put it:

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post-anarchism

[W]e can recognize that anarchism’s
naturalist view of human beings plays
an ethical role in its political theory [...]
Moreover, the naturalist justification al-
lows anarchists to assume their ethics
rather than having to argue for them.

If the human essence is already benign,
then there is no need to articulate what
kinds of human activity are good and
what kinds are bad (May, 1994: 64).

It strikes me that this is precisely what makes
anarchism’s avoidance of meta- ethical questions so
relevant: it is at once an avoidance and yet also cru-
cially an openness or flexibility to all ethical foun-
dations and systems. As Saul Newman has put it:
[Ajnarchism is, fundamentally, an eth-
ical critique of authority — almost an
ethical duty to question and resist dom-
ination in all its forms. In this sense it
may be read against itself: its implicit
critique of authority may be used against
the authoritarian cunents which run
throughout its classical discourse. In
other words, this ethical ‘core’ of anarch-
ism can perhaps be rescued, through the
logic already outlined, from its classical
nineteenth-century context. For instance,

as I have already indicated, the critique
of authority may be expanded to involve
struggles other than the struggle against
state domination. [...] Perhaps anarch-
ism should be read as a series of possible
contradictions which can be used against
one another and which can produce new
possibilities. Kropotkin argues that ‘in-
ner contradiction is the very condition
of ethics’. For something to be ethical
it can never be absolute. Poststructural-
ism rejected morality because it was an
absolutist discourse intolerant to differ-
ence: this is the point at which morality
becomes unethical (Newman, [2001]

2007: 166-7).

This ostensible ‘ethics of inner contradiction’
runs counter to the project of manifest anarchist
philosophy and yet there is a sense in which it is
its guarantor. May we not, at least provisionally,
presume that, for anarchism, the ethical injunction
against authority in all of its forms implies a certain
degree of flexibility with regards to the proper modes
of conduct under varying contexts? Moreover, does
itnot imply, if taken to its limit, the absence ofplace
and process — the negative foundation and system
inherent to meta-ethics? The rejection of the meta-

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post-anarchism

ethical framework upon which the tradition has
been built, or the avoidance of the question, is ethics
proper, a negation of the authority of morality, big
or small, in all of its forms, however respectful, from
duty to virtue, anarchism is an endless fountain of
possibilities because it is founded on the unstable
foundation and system of no-thing. This is the
non- absolutist core that is (and always has been)
traditional anarchism. It is this core that post-
anarchism attempts to rescue from manifest ethics.

We can imagine an ethics that never settles
upon any of the main trends in meta-ethical
philosophy. It may be said that this accordance
with the trajectory of a negative ethical force comes
about as one possible response to the problem of
the reification of anarchistidentities and the growing
shopping list of oppressions: the ethical anarchist
subject who remains at the threshold of the latent
ethical force will not be as prone as other subjects
toward the reduction of anarchist practice, identity,
and structures of power, to any select manifestations.
In short, she will ensure the life of anarchism as a
discourse. Before returning to the trends in post-
anarchist philosophy I would like to make two short
detours through the meta-ethical philosophies of
‘virtue anarchism’ and ‘anarchist utilitarianism.’ I
argue that virtue ethics are an inadequate meta-
ethical framework for traditional anarchism because

171

of an inability to conceive of non-virtuous actions
as properly ethical responses to given situations.
Utilitarianism, on the other hand, sacrifices the
means for the ends of ethical actions and thereby
poses a more obviously inadequate interpretation of
traditional anarchist meta-ethics.

Post anarchist Virtue

Benjamin Franks’s reply to post-anarchism
was that it resulted in a form of meta-ethical rela-
tivism that is ultimately indefensible because of its
subjectivist orientation (Franks, 2008a, 2008b).
Elsewhere Franks has argued that post-anarchism
has an authoritarian core, based on this subjectivist
framework: “To universally prioritize the practices of
post- anarchism would be to recreate vanguards and
hierarchies, structures that both post- anarchism and
more traditional anarchism reject” (Franks, 2011:
177). We must temporarily suspend our judgement
of Franks’s contradictory reading of post-anarchism
as, firstly, a crude subjectivist relativism and then, in
his conclusion, a strange universalism, in order to
expose Franks’s underlying prescription: “Today, a
more modest version of post- anarchism is required:
one that views itself as (another) modification of
anarchism, more pertinent for particular social and
cultural contexts, but less so in others, rather than
a categorical suppression” (Franks, 2011: 176). I

post-anarchism

172

shall return to the problem of reading post-an-
archism as a categorical suppression of traditional
anarchism shortly (and I have already argued that
post- anarchism is already “another modification
of anarchism [that is] more pertinent for particular
social and cultural contexts” (Franks, 2011: 176)).
As a remedy to the problematic ethical foundation of
post- anarchism, Franks outlined what he thought to
be a traditionally anarchist form of ethics grounded
in the social practices of ethical agents, what he
called ‘virtue ethics.’

Franks described a prefigurative anarchism
based on virtuous social practice that was grounded
in the work of Alasdair MacIntyre. 19 In this reading,
Franks remained committed to the Kropotkinian
meta-ethics that “identifies [the] good as being in-
herent to social practices, which have their own rules,
which are negotiable and alter over time” (Franks,
2008b: 147). This, once again, is what Kropotkin
called ‘sociability.’ Franks shared post-anarchism’s
critical attitude vis-a-vis universalism, and he was
indeed in agreement with the post- anarchists when
he argued that consequentialist, utilitarian, and de-
ontological ethics have no place in any anarchist
discourse. Yet he restricted his own ethical system

19 Thomas Swann has argued that Franks’s approach may contradict
the overall trajectory of Alasdair MacIntyres own ethical framework (cf.,
Swann, 2010).

173

to a means subservient to an end , even while he pro-
claimed to do otherwise:

Elements of a virtue theory can be ob-
served in the oft-repeated principle
within anarchism that means have to be
in accordance with (or prefigure) ends.
Bakunin, for instance, criticised Nechaev
precisely because the latter could not
‘reconcile means with ends.’ Prefigura-
tion avoids the ends/means distinction
of rights based and consequentialist eth-
ics; instead the means used are supposed
to encapsulate the values desired in their
preferred goals (Franks, 2011).

The problem is that any a priori concretization
of ethics, whether in terms of virtue or any loose flex-
ibility, achieves a coherence of means through ends.
Essentially, this is Zygmunt Bau-man’s argument
against certain positive meta-ethical systems:

The long search for secure [or stable]
foundations of moral conduct here comes
full circle. Mistrusting the sentiments
declared a priori as fickle and mercur-
ial, the seekers of foundations put their
wager on the rational decision maker
they set to extricate from the shell of er-
ratic emotions. This shifting of the wager

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post-anarchism

was intended to be the act of liberation:
following the emotions was defined as
unfreedom [...] exchanging the depend-
ence of action on [irrational] feelings for
its dependence on reason. Reason is, by
definition, rule guided; acting reason-
ably means following certain rules. [...]

By the end of the day, the moral person
has been unhooked from the bonds of
autonomous emotions only to be put in
the harness of heteronomous rules. The
search that starts from the disbelief in
the self’s moral capacity ends up in the
denial of the self’s right to moral judge-
ment (Bauman, 1993: 69).

That which slips out from reason’s grasp is the
very stuff of ethics and there is no positive meta-
ethical framework that can, at any time, describe
or encourage ethical actions through the discourse
of positivity. I would hazard to flip Franks’s claim
that post- anarchist subjectivism passes into the do-
main of authoritarianism into the claim that virtu-
ous practical ethics, as the rational manifestation
of the reasoning decision-maker who decides on
what precisely these virtues amount to, subverts
the virtue of autonomy held by many anarchist vir-
tue theorists. Like all positive meta-ethical systems,

i75

they promote their own failure. Virtues are, after all
is said and done, subjective — but we can not also
say that subjectivism is itself a virtue. The problem
is that Franks was hesitant to define what lists of
practices are to be considered the ‘good’. On this
question, we are only instructed that prefigura-
tive politics falls in line with virtue ethics. But this
only postpones the question. The inevitable ques-
tion one should raise to Benjamin Franks is: why
this avoidance of the manifestation of these virtues,
what are anarchist virtues? The response will come
that in rejecting universalism in favour of local eth-
ics distinct cultures and social groups are able to
define these virtues using their own discursive lim-
itations/constructs. This is the utopian dimension
of Franks’s project, as we know locales will always
have leaders that will be uprooted by anti - authori -
tarian subjects and this is precisely why we philoso-
phize about prefigurative politics — prefiguration is
primarily an open method of experimentation. We
do not know how to answer the question of pro-
cess, that is, what the future society will look like
and how to get to it. Prefiguration is the assurance
that ethical principles never objectively settle, that
unique subjects are able to sort their own ethics in
the midst of an everyday battle. On this topic Cindy
Milstein has argued, essentially, that prefigura-
tion, as an ethical practice, is a negative force —

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post-anarchism

“anarchism as a political philosophy excels [...] in
its ongoing suspicion of all phenomena as possible
forms of domination, and its concurrent belief in
nonhierarchical social relations and organization.
This ethical impulse [...] to live every day as a so-
cial critic and social visionary [...] certainly infuses
anarchist rhetoric” (Milstein, 2007) — and as the
grounding for manifest ethics: “It also underscores
all those values that anarchists generally share: mu-
tual aid, solidarity, voluntary association, and so on”
(Milstein, 2007). Perhaps, to take this argument to
its conclusion, the virtue of prefiguration ultimately
collapses into the type of nihilistic spirit that I am
describing as the system of traditional anarchism.

There is the further problem of the replace-
ment of the place of the essential human with the
place of the virtuous anarchist. For, if one can be
said to act virtuously, one must as a necessity con-
struct another categorization which far surpasses,
indeed escapes, the logic of virtue: the vice. John
L. Mackie, in his timeless work on meta-ethics, has
used this logic to attack virtue ethics:

There can be no doubt that [...] courage
is in general advantageous to its pos-
sessor — more advantageous than a ten-
dency to calculate advantage too nicely.

In so far as one can choose one’s dis-
positions — say by cultivating them — this

177

is one which it would be rational, even
on purely egoistic grounds, to choose.
Admittedly there will be particular occa-
sions when rashness would be rewarded,
and others when only the coward would
survive. But it is hard to calculate which
these are, and almost impossible to
switch the dispositions on and off ac-
cordingly. To be a coward on the one oc-
casion when courage is fatal one would
have had to be a coward on many other
occasions when it was much better to be
courageous (Mackie, 1977: 189).

Thus, when Franks argued that “the rules of
chess, which are different to those of football or
poker, are not required to be imposed on the players;
participants merely must share and abide by these
principles in order to gain the benefits from the
game, such as improved concentration and patience”
(Franks, 2011), I am inclined to imagine the
anarchist who disturbs the entire chess board, kicks
the referee, upsets the clock, and screams ‘I can play
more games than you can imagine on my behalf!’

Anarchist Utilitarianism: A Minor Detour

According to Malatesta, “the end justifies the
means: we have spoken much ill of that maxim [...]

post-anarchism

178

In reality, it is the universal guide of conduct [...] It
is necessary to seek morality in the end; the means
is [sic] fatally determined” (Malatesta, [2010]).
Through this we have arrived at the underlying
principle of utilitarianism: the utility of the means
are valued by the consequences achieved — from
within the tension of means and ends, in all
utilitarian meta-ethics there is a conflation of
means to ends. I do not want to spend a great
deal of time writing about anarchist utilitarianism
because I believe its real value for anarchists is self-
evident (that is, the majority of anarchists are fully
aware of the limitations of ethical utilitarianism).
Instead I will briefly go over an admittedly small
(extremely small) portion of the literature to arrive
at an understanding of the value of utilitarianism
for post-anarchist politics. This concept will be
important for a later section, which explores
the argument that Bataille’s philosophy did not
aim to consolidate ends to means, as much of
contemporary anarchist philosophy aims to do, but
rather his philosophy aimed to describe an ethics
without-means and without-ends. I will not refer
to any of the traditional utilitarian anarchists (ie,
William Godwin and others), but rather restrict my
focus to Benjamin Franks’s critique of utilitarianism
to further elaborate this point.

The problem is rather obvious. As Franks has

179

argued: “The [...] problem is [that] by prioritising
ends over means, individuals become reduced to
mere instruments, and are robbed of autonomy and
dignity” (Franks, 2008a). But this problem reaches
a new level of complexity under post-modernism
as the preoccupation with ends are themselves no
longer sustainable. As Bauman put it, during the
contemporary period“[i]ssues have no predetermined
solutions” (1993: 32) and this renders all attempts
at prefiguring the means with which to achieve
maximum consequence/utilization naive at best.
How to, for example, attend to a solution which
prohibits the manifestation of itself as an issue in
the first ■place? Similarly, today we no longer know
how to distinguish between cause and symptom — as
Lewis Call has argued: “The postmodern anarchist
views capitalism and statism not as causes but as
effects, not as diseases but as symptoms” (Call,
2002: 117) — and symptoms have now taken the
place of disease. As a consequence we achieve a
sense in which “the truth of the matter is opposite
to the one we have been told [...] It is society, its
continuing existence and its well-being, that is made
possible by the moral competence of its members —
not the other way round” (Bauman, 1993: 32).
Ours is a time in which utility serves only to obscure
the truth of ethical origin and process, the emptiness
from whence these processes have emerged:

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post-anarchism

In as far as the modem obsession with
purposefulness and utility and the
equally obsessive suspicion of all things
autotelic (that is, claiming to be their
own ends, and not means to something
else than themselves) fade away, mor-
ality stands the chance of finally com-
ing into its own [...] no moral impulse
can survive, let alone emerge unscathed
from, the acid test of usefulness or prof-
it. And since all immorality begins with
demanding such a test — from the moral
subject, or from the object of its moral
impulse, or both (Bauman, 1993: 36).

The failure of utility, and more broadly the fail-
ure of positive meta-ethics, occurs as if it were pre-
supposed, ironically, from within the meta-ethical
system. The concept of utility collapses upon itself.
The critique of this meta-ethics takes its penultim-
ate deviation in Bauman’s proclamation that:

There are no hard-and-fast principles
which one can learn, memorize and de-
ploy in order to escape situations with-
out a good outcome and to spare one-
self the bitter after-taste (call it scruples,
guilty conscience, or sin) which comes
unsolicited in the wake of the decisions

181

taken and fulfilled. Human reality is
messy and ambiguous — and so moral
decisions, unlike abstract ethical prin-
ciples, are ambivalent. It is in this sort
of world that we must live; and yet, as
if defying the worried philosophers who
cannot conceive of an ‘unprincipled’
morality, a morality without founda-
tions, we demonstrate day by day that
we can live, or learn to live, or manage
to live in such a world, though few of
us would be ready to spell out, if asked,
what the principles that guide us are,
and fewer still would have heard about
the ‘foundations’ which we allegedly
cannot do without to be good and kind
to each other [...] Knowing that to be the
truth [...] is to be postmodern (Bauman,
1993 : 36 ).

Apropos of Bauman’s claim that we live day-to-
day without the ability to spell out the principles that
guide us, I would like to provide a basic example. I
share a class at university with some anarchists and
many non- anarchists. Outside of class, we organize.
During our meetings outside of the classroom we
find ourselves preoccupied with the establishment of
certain democratic practices of consensus: we must

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post-anarchism

use a speakers list, we must all come together with
an agreement about what types of behaviours are
unacceptable, hostile, and so on. We never really
do anything, we spend weeks planning how to or-
ganize and, as a result, nothing ever happens. One
event that we planned involved a guest lecturer, a
public lecture for the community. All but two non-
academicians were present. Of these two non-aca-
demicians, one was homeless and the other was a
‘loud’ and provocative speaker. Each interrupted the
presentation in turn: the one interrupted to ask for
clarification and to explain why our academic babble
did not make sense to him and the other interrupted
precisely to disrupt this process of clarification, to
complicate things all the more. These exchanges
made everybody in the room noticeably agitated, al-
most on the verge of disavowed excitement. The an-
archists talked about the disruption for weeks, and
about how to keep something like this from happen-
ing again. They decided to implement the speaker’s
list, and so on. The question for me is: why, when
we attend class every week as students, do we not
need a speaker’s list? Why do we tolerate the dis-
ruptions in the classroom? Why does it work in the
classroom and not in the street?

I risk the conjecture that contemporary an-
archists have turned to virtue ethics and prefigura-
tive philosophy as a way of creating a more flexible

183

meta-ethical system. It does not strike them that
perhaps the answer to place and process deserve a
simpler and more obvious response: unprincipled
morality that emerges from no-where in particular is
the fuel that sustains this juggernaut we call social
life. This is what post- anarchism reminds traditional
anarchists: to no longer be seduced by the discourse
of power. That is, to paraphrase and appropriate
Bauman’s words, post-anarchism is about the rejec-
tion of hard-and-fast principles which one can learn,
memorize and enact (as virtuous practice). Our real-
ity is messy and unlearned — and so is our meta-eth-
ical framework. We ultimately reject positive ethical
principles, abstractions from life, in favour of an eth-
ics without positive foundations or systems and, like
good post-Kropotkinians, we demonstrate day by
day that we can live in such a world. Knowing that to
be the truth is to be post-anarchist. We thus aban-
don the positive meta-ethical framework in philoso-
phy and render obsolete in practice the reduction of
action to traditional manifest rulebooks. The politics
of the classroom is a politics awaiting the eruption
of the street but never able to symbolize it into the
rulebook of consensus and speaker’s lists.

Trends in Post Anarchism

Post-anarchism has more commonly been as-
sociated with one of two trends over the last two

184 post-anarchism

decades: first, and most popularly, it has referred
to the extension of traditional anarchist philosophy
by way of interventions into/from post-structuralist
and/or post-modem philosophy, or; second, and
most prevalent in the non-anglophone world, post-
anarchism has been understood as an attempt to ex-
plore new connections between traditional anarch-
ist philosophy and non-anarchist radical philosophy
without thereby reducing these explorations to de-
velopments from any particular philosophical group.
According to adherents of this second trend in post-
anarchist philosophy, post-anarchism is thought to
be the description of a set of relationships between
anarchism and an outside world. There have been
two related ways in which to understand the location
of this radical outside, each of which is further dis-
tinguished according to the direction of its influence.

First, there is the obvious outside, the influ-
ence of which is felt to come from the ‘innermost
outside’ of the anarchist tradition; this is the non-
anarchist outside that is discovered by bringing an-
archism into a relationship with disciplines outside
of the narrow field of political sociology (including
film, music, geography, and others; this is what the
post- anarchist journal Anarchist Developments
in Cultural Studies has described as its modus

185

Figure 2.0 - The Symbolic Order of Anarchism

operandi). 20 This refers also more generally to the
‘innermost outside’ of the anarchist tradition — what
many have felt the need to define as ‘anarchistic’ so
as to describe something which is almost anarch-
ist — such as Situationist Marxism, anti -civilization
and primitivist thought, Zapatismo, and so on. But
there is also the outside whose effects are felt from
the ‘intimate without’ of the anarchist tradition (ie,
the ‘extimacy’ 21 of the traditional anarchist dis-
course), which I am moved to call (and have been
calling, throughout this essay) anarchy. The initial
phase or “introductory period” (Evren, in Evren &

20 See http://www.anarchlst-developments.org

21 Jacques- Alain Miller has argued that Lacan’s use of the term
‘extimacy’ “Is necessary In order to escape the common ravings about
a psychism supposedly located In a blpartltlon between Interior and
exterior” (Miller, 2008).

186

post-anarchism

Rousselle, 2011) of post-anarchism is the explora-
tion of this second ill-defined relationship to an ‘in-
timate without’— the manifestation of this extimacy
has brought about the interrogation of the anarchist
tradition from the inside through, in the anglophone
world, a questioning of the manifest interpretations
of classical anarchist philosophy. In this regard,
post- anarchism should not be reduced to a critique
against the essentialism of classical anarchism be-
cause this describes only one of the relationships
that post-anarchists seek to elaborate (although,
this is probably the strongest relationship).

There are some similarities between the
typology that I have outlined to describe the
outside that post-anarchism seeks to explore and
the tripartite typology outlined by Benjamin Franks
in his article “Postanarchism and Meta-Ethics”
(2007). Franks has argued that there are three main
trends within post-anarchist theorizing: (1) the
“^orf-anarchism that rejects traditional anarchist
concerns” (Franks, 2007: 8), (2) the “redemptive
post - anarchism that seeks the adoption into
anarchism of poststructural theory to enrich and
enliven existing practices” (Franks, 2007: 8), and;
(3) the “postmodern accounts] of postanarchism
[that] concentrate on the anarchist features of
relatively recent phenomenon” (Franks, 2007: 8-9).
Admittedly, the three trends that Franks outlines

187

are beneficial for discovering manifest themes in
the post- anarchist literature but they do not outline
or seek to discover implicit themes that have been
hinted at sufficiently by post-anarchists nor do they
spell out whether these trends are mutually exclusive
with regards to their particular manifestations
or whether they derive in some instances from a
common movement (for example, Lewis Call's
work which has been a part of two of these trends
rather than just one). Moreover, Franks sutures
the discursive system of post-anarchism, thereby
grinding it to a halt. He does this by closing the
symbolic system off (rather than redirecting it into
new and implied pathways) by producing a single
image for the reader's consumption. The problem
is that Franks has waged his critique against post-
anarchism from within the imaginary order — his
preconceived image of the post- anarchists and their
discourse reflects and further impresses upon the
tradition Franks believes himself to be defending
(Vanheule et al, 2003: 324) — rather than from
within the domain of the symbolic order whereby,
in an ironic twist, he would once again be working
from within the post- anarchist paradigm even while
reacting against it. Post-anarchism has always
embraced a constitutively open discourse which can
not be reduced to strict imaginary representations.

A woman pointed a gun at a man’s face. The

188

post-anarchism

man held up his hands and asked the woman for
a moment to explain. He said, “You do not know
me, and I have done nothing to you. Can you please
just give me a moment to reflect on my life before
you shoot me?” The woman nodded and in an in-
stant was shot herself. The man, looking down at
the woman, asked her if she had any last reflec-
tions. She responded, “I have lost faith in others.”
Does this not outline the problem that the critics
of post- anarchism face today? They have lost faith
in post- anarchism because of its crude reduction of
the classical anarchist tradition, but, at the same
time, they are only able to say this after first pro-
viding a crude reduction of post- anarchism them-
selves. Some critics of post- anarchism (Antliff,
2007; Cohn & Wilbur, 2003; Cohn, 2002; Day,
2005; Franks, 2011; Sasha K, 2004; Zabalaza,
2003) have rejected post- anarchism on the prob-
lematic grounds of its introductory phase whereby a
caricature of the complexities of classical anarchism
are presented, but they have done so in the spirit
of post-anarchism through a rejection of the very
practices and conditions (essentialism, reduction-
ism) upon which post-anarchism has defined its op-
position. In this sense, many of the critics of post-
anarchism are very much working within a time of
post- anarchism. To work from within the symbolic
order (rather than from within the wholeness of the

imaginary order) implies a rewriting of the founda-
tions and systems that have proved problematic or
burdensome in the first place (cf., Vanheule et al.,
2003; Lacanians are fond of calling this process
“dialecticizing the symptom”, a process that brings
closed discourses into ever new relationships with
other discourses and signifiers).

An examination of the latent content as well as
the manifest content reveals important links between
post- and traditional anarchism. I would like to take
seriously the claim made by Benjamin Franks: “[post-
anarchism] regards certain forms of postanarchism
as being consistent with the most coherent forms of
practical ‘classical’ anarchism” (Franks, 2007). The
reduction of a diachronic political tradition to its syn-
chronic manifestations risks precisely this problem-
atic reading: Franks assumes that the anarchist trad-
ition is a ‘practical’ tradition first and foremost rather
than a negative ethical imperative (whereby this
‘imperative’ should not be reduced to deontological
ethics) animated by its latent impulse. The ethical
commitment has manifested itself across differing
combinations of responses to place and process and
should therefore not be reduced to the practice-based
ethic. The majority of post-anarchists have argued
that their philosophies are firmly rooted within trad-
itional anarchism (cf., Saint Schmidt, 2008) and the
error of reducing classical anarchism to a caricature

190

post-anarchism

of its profound complexities is precisely the error of a
lingering manifest classical anarchism.

Regarding the first trend that I outlined (the
extension of traditional anarchist philosophy by way
of interventions into/from post-structuralist and/
or post-modem philosophy), there have been two
further sub-divisions. First, there have been those
anarchists whose interest in post-structuralism has
been to extend the domain of anarchist philoso-
phizing through the inclusion of recent develop-
ments in either post-structuralist or post-modem
philosophy. The other approach has been in the
opposite direction, beginning from the standpoint
of post-structuralism and gamering insights from
the anarchist tradition in order to widen the scope
of post-structuralist philosophy (this argument has
also been made by Sureyyya Evren in Rousselle &
Evren, 2011). Some post-anarchists, such as Gab-
riel Kuhn (who would probably reject this label),
have found this approach suspect: “An anarchist
engagement with poststructuralism would hence
consist of an anarchist evaluation of the usefulness
of poststructuralist theory for anarchism's aims”
(Kuhn, 2009: 19). 22 According to Kuhn, anarch-

22 This same sentiment is recast for post-modernity: “An anarchist
engagement with postmodernity would hence consist of an anarchist
analysis of this condition — potentially helping anarchists to understand the
socio-cultural dynamics of postmodern times” (Kuhn, 2009: 18).

191

ists will need to absorb what is good in the post-
structuralist discourse into their own (probably eth-
ical discourse) or else risk losing or obscuring what
is central about anarchist philosophy.

Todd May, one of the most noted anglophone
post-anarchists, arrived to anarchism through his
exploration of post-structuralism, as Sureyyya Ev-
ren argued: “May is predominantly working on the
politics of post-structuralism while gaining some
insights from anarchism to create a more effect-
ive post-structuralist politics [...] Post- anarchism is
better understood [...] as an anarchist theory first
and foremost rather than a post- structuralist theory”
(Sureyyya Evren in Rousselle & Evren, 2011). In
the late 1 980s, May found himself on a train head-
ing to the Eastern Division meetings of the Amer-
ican Philosophical Association and he took the time
to strike up a conversation about post-structuralist
political theory with Mark Lance (General Director
of the Institute for Anarchist Studies):

I was trying to explain to a friend, Mark
Lance, what the political theory of post-
structuralism was all about. He listened
more patiently than he should have and
then said, ‘It sounds like anarchism to
me.’ That comment was the seed of an
article, “Is Post- Structuralist Political
Theory Anarchist?” — which appeared

192

post-anarchism

in Philosophy and Social Criticism in
1989 — and eventually of the present
work [...] And Mark Lance has, over the
years, provided me with intellectual rich-
es far exceeding my ability to put them
to good use (May, 1994: ix-x).

The chance encounter with Mark Lance ap-
pears to have shaped the ethical core of Todd May's
post-structuralist anarchist philosophy (and it per-
haps was the seed for a book on post-structuralist
ethics, now with the anarchism qualifier omitted,
in 2004) but anarchism has not been his primary
commitment by any stretch of the imagination. One
can surmise from his list of major publications — Be-
tween Genealogy and Epistemology (1993), The
Political Philosophy of Post-structuralist Anarch-
ism (1994), Reconsidering Difference (1997),
Our Practices, Our Selves, or, What It Means to
Be Human (2001), Operation Defensive Shield
(2003), The Moral Theory of Poststructuralism
(2004), Grilles Deleuze (2005), (The) Philoso-
phy of Foucault (2006), The Political Thought
of Jacques Ranciere: Creating Equality (2008 a),
Death (2008b) — that May's short detour through
anarchist political philosophy was only integral
to maintaining the project of post-structuralism.
What post-structuralism needed, what it was un-

193

able to define from within its own discursive par-
ameters, was its anti -authoritarian ethics. May has
weeded the anarchist tradition of what, by impli-
cation, has not been realized from within its own
discursive boundaries and then retained the anti-
authoritarian ethical commitment (translated into
a critique of humanism and naturalism) by another
name: Todd May, the ^orf-anarchist. May has put
this matter most eloquently:

[P]o st- structuralist theory is indeed an-
archist. It is in fact more consistently an-
archist than traditional anarchist theory
has proven to be. The theoretical well-
spring of anarchism — the refusal of rep-
resentation by political or conceptual
means in order to achieve self-determin-
ation along a variety of registers and at
different local levels — finds its underpin-
nings articulated most accurately by the
post-structuralist political theorists (Todd
May, in Evren & Rousselle, 2011: 44).

One might question the thesis that “post-
structuralist theory is [...] more consistently anarch-
ist than traditional anarchist theory has proven to
be” (Todd May, in Evren & Rousselle, 2011: 44)
on the grounds that May's preoccupation with
post-structuralism has been founded on the latent

194

post-anarchism

ethical code of traditional anarchism whereas post-
structuralist political philosophy, even though it very
often demonstrates evidence to the contrary, does
not inherently imply the anti -authoritarian injunc-
tion. Indeed, upon further inspection it becomes dif-
ficult to define what precisely is meant by the term
‘post- structuralism’ at all (especially considering
that many of those individuals most typically asso-
ciated with post-structuralism have not themselves
accepted the distinction), as Simon Choat puts it:
[W]hat is meant by 'post-structuralism'

[...]? It is not insignificant that the lead-
ing representatives of [post-anarchism]
have all given [their project] a different
name: Saul Newman refers to postan-
archism, Todd May to post-structuralist
anarchism, and Lewis Call to postmod-
ern anarchism. These different labels in
part reflect disagreement about who can
be termed a ’post-structuralist’ (Choat,
2011 : 53 ).

While there is certainly an anarchistic reading
of select post-structuralist authors, there is also at
least one other possible reading of post-structural-
ist ethics (from Levinas through to Derrida) that re-
veals a dimension that is much more akin to a crude
liberal democratic ethics as opposed to a passionate

195

anti -authoritarian ethic of confrontation founded in
the onto-ethical ‘war model.’ 23 If, on the other hand,
one describes a particular philosopher who has
often been associated with the post-structuralism
movement and can relate this author to an anarch -
istic impulse, that is, to an anti -authoritarian ethos,
one is typically only able to do this first by achieving
a distance from the language of anti-authoritarian-
ism: the language of post-structuralism is unclear
in of itself with regards to its anarchism and this
is why the relationship between the two bodies of
thought is only now coming into view. If it were ap-
parent, and obvious, it should not have prompted
the ethical question that May has tried to answer
in Chapter 6 of his post-structuralist anarchism
book: “Two questions have stalked poststructuralist
discourse from its inception: Is it epistemically co-
herent? and Can it be ethically grounded?” (1994:
121). May was correct in writing, then, that “the
poststructuralists have always avoided [an] overt
discussion of ethics” (May, 1994: 15) but where
he has been insincere, from my reading, is with re-
spect to his privileging of post-structuralist political
philosophy at the expense of the anarchist under-

23 For an explanation of the war model see Newman ([2001] 2007:
50-1, 80-1). For a great explanation of the problems of statism inherent
to the Levinasian/Derridean ethical trajectory see “Smashing the
Neighbor's Face” by Slavoj Zizek (2005).

196

post-anarchism

pinning. At times, May openly validated my thesis:
Anarchism's naturalism in positing a
human essence contains within it an
insight — though not a naturalist one —
that will prove crucial for understanding
poststructuralist political philosophy. [...]

It will be seen that the poststructuralist
perspective requires precisely this kind
of ethical discourse in order to realize its
political theory, although, as with polit-
ical theory generally, a poststructuralist
ethics does not by itself found the theory
but, rather, interacts with the political
and social context to codetermine it. [...]

(May, 1994: 40-1).

Based on this, there are sufficient grounds for
the critique raised against Todd May by Siireyyya
Evren (Evren in Rousselle & Evren, 201 1). 24

There have also been two main points of de-
parture for post-anarchist critiques of traditional
anarchist political philosophy: epistemological and
ontological. The point to be made is that the cri-

24 A further line of questioning against May might include his

critique of both traditional anarchism and post- structuralist political
philosophy as lacking ethical expression while maintaining that they
both claim to be ethical traditions. In this sense, why choose post-
structuralism as the truly ethical tradition over anarchism? What is at
stake in this choice?

197

tique against traditional anarchist philosophy has
come from one of the two positions, epistemo-
logical or ontological, rather than from a mixture
of the possibilities that may be realized by combin-
ing the two areas (as I have attempted to do in this
book through meta-ethics). By way of assessing
truth claims inherent in traditional anarchist phil-
osophy (for their universalist pretensions), most
post- anarchists have adopted an epistemologically
grounded assault on essentialist ontology that has
tended to take on the characteristics of an endorse-
ment of democratic pluralist and philosophical
relativist positions. There have also been those —
the more promising of the two approaches — that
have developed alternative ontological foundations
grounded on the model of schizophrenic subjectiv-
ity (Newman, [2001] 2007: 103; Perez, 1990) or
else the Lacanian/Stinerian model of empty sub-
jectivity (Newman, [2001] 2007). With regards
to the two trends of post-anarchist philosophizing,
none have adequately elaborated the anarchist eth-
ics that has motivated their anti-essentialism: none
have described post- anarchism as a meta-ethics of
traditional anarchism. Without this elaboration of
ethics we are led to believe that post-anarchist phil-
osophizing begins from either the epistemological
or the ontological point of departure — which they
currently appear to — rather than as a consequence

198

post-anarchism

of an explicit ethical foundation and system that
appeals to nihilist (that is, having to do with an-
archy) responses to place and process.

Post-anarchist philosophers have been pre-
occupied with outlining an anti-essentialistvariant of
anarchist political philosophy but they have hitherto
relied on relativist epistemological approaches. For
example, Andrew Koch has argued that, in contrast
to an ontological defence of anarchism, an epis-
temologically based theory of anarchism questions
the processes out of which a ‘characterization’ of
the individual occurs (Koch, in Rousselle & Evren,
2011: 26). If the validity of the representation of
truth-claims can be questioned then the political
structures that rest upon these foundations must
also be suspect (ibid.). This epistemological defence
of post- anarchism inevitably falls into a form of
relativism but it does not necessarily reject the posi-
tive response to the meta-ethical question of pro-
cess. For Koch, this approach received its political
voice in “democratic pluralism” (ibid., 38).

Unfortunately, meaningful political engage-
ment is precluded by this approach as anarchism
becomes only one approach among many without
the universal relevance required for any revolution-
ary discourse. Contrarily, to begin from a place of
ethics presumes the possibility of political engage-
ment and revolutionary commitment. If post-an-

199

archism is to rise above the criticism laid against
it, that it is “post-revolution” (cf., Sasha K, 2004),
post- anarchists will have to remain firmly within
the universalist framework rather than the relativist
one currently in vogue among radicals; or else they
must provide an elaboration, as I have been trying
to do here, of anarchist meta- ethics in the negative
dimension. To be sure, I am speaking about a uni-
versalist ethics that takes the absurd joke as truth.
The trick is to move from a post- anarchism that re-
jects the universal dimension of ethics in favour of
the relativist, toward a post-anarchism grounded in
non-idealistic materialism, in base materialism, the
forces of the base economy.

In the next chapter I shall aim to demonstrate
that Bataille’s approach to ethics — his beginning
from the place of meta- ethics rather than from
epistemology or ontology — permits him to describe
a place of pure exteriority heretofore unrealized by
both traditional and post- anarchisms. In this re-
gard, Georges Bataille has written, “[t]he extension
of economic growth itself requires the overturning
of economic principles — the overturning of the eth-
ics that grounds them” (1991: 25). Here we see
that while post-anarchism was a destabilization
of the positivity of meta-ethical responses to the
question of place, the base materialism of Bataille
is a destabilization of the positive meta-ethical re-

200

post-anarchism

sponses to the question of process. If post-anarch-
ism has been a paradoxical relativism grounded in
the latent base subjectivist meta-ethical framework
then post-anarchism after Bataille will be a para-
doxical universalism grounded in the base material-
ist meta-ethical framework.

201

Toward an Ethics of the Outside

Three major claims have brought me to this
section on Georges Bataille’s meta-ethics. First, I
have argued that the c factor of traditional an-
archist philosophy is ‘ethics’ and that it has been
brought to the fore by way of the post-anarchist
discourse. Second, apropos of the first thesis, I
have argued that post-anarchism has become one
of the most vocal contemporary meta-ethical dis-
courses on traditional anarchist philosophy. In
this regard, post- anarchism has waged a critique
against manifest anarchist ethics that has centred
around the exposition of a repressed underside to
its meta-ethical foundation. We have seen that
this underside has also been theorized contempor-
aneously by the dominant school of nihilists within
meta-ethical discourse. Finally, I have argued that
post-anarchism, as a discourse (among discourses),
has largely assumed a base subjectivist response to
meta-ethical questions. This does not necessarily
pose a problem for post-anarchist philosophers but
in keeping with the ethical trajectory of its negative
attribute there are two areas in which post-anarch-
ists could potentially stand to benefit: they could
adopt a negative, rather than a relativist, response
to the problem of universalism within the question
of process, and they could reject the subject as the

202

post-anarchism

central category of ethical agency. I shall argue that
there is yet another response to the meta-ethical
questions of place and process: one may respond
negatively to the epistemological problem of uni-
versalism by rejecting all truth- claims and one may
likewise take the ontological problematic of non-
being to its limit by rejecting the subject as the
locus of ethical agency. In doing so, post- anarchists
could bring traditional anarchism’s c factor to frui-
tion. This latter position is correlative to the meta-
ethical position of Georges Bataille.

First of all, I will defend a non-hermeneutical
method of reading Bataille’s work as the only possible
way to unearth the truth inherent to Bataille’s un-
stable discourse. I shall also risk the preliminary con-
jecture that Bataille’s relationship to post-structural-
ist philosophy was an ironic one: he at once overcame
the limitations of post-structuralist philosophy (spe-
cifically, the problem of relativism) and yet he also
presupposed post-structuralist philosophy (broadly,
the destabilization of universalism) — the irony of this
statement is revealed by the fact that Bataille’s writ-
ing came before the advent of structuralism as a gen-
eral philosophy. It is therefore just as likely that post-
anarchism, or post- anarchism after Georges Ba-
taille, has revealed a retroactive truth inherent to the
traditional anarchist discourse. If it can be claimed
that Bataille’s philosophy is also a post-structuralist

203

philosophy, albeit one that transcends the problem
of conventional post-structuralism (relativism as the
positive response to the critique of universalism), it
could also be claimed that post- anarchism has retro-
actively revealed the truth of traditional anarchism.
May we also say that post- anarchism after Bataille
has revealed a truth about the direction traditional
anarchist philosophy may now be moving — the fu-
ture truth of traditional anarchism?

I will highlight some ofthe concepts that appear
to be of primary utility for this project which I have
set before me: the general economy, heterogeneity,
base materialism, sovereignty, abjection, headless
community, sacrifice and silence. I use each concept
as a stepping stone to the final concept, tracing a
movement from Bataille’s meta-ethics to his even
more paradoxical first order ethics of sacrifice. I am
also making the claim that the earlier concepts carry
much more authority in Bataille’s writing than the
latter concepts . 25 Moreover, each of these concepts
are taxonomically commensurate but each takes a
unique point of departure within the economy of
his discourse. In this sense, this chapter introduces
multiple entry-points for thinking post-anarchism
after Bataille. These concepts also help us to uncov-

25 This claim has been made by Benjamin Noys in various ways (Noys,
2000: passim). For this reason it should be no surprise that I have heavily
cited several of Noys s works throughout the entirety of this section.

post-anarchism

204

er the hidden dimension in Bataille’s work, namely
the anarchistic logic of ‘the general state,’ my own
neologism. To the extent that Marxism influenced
Bataille’s notion of the general economy, we may
also say that the latent reading of Bataille’s text re-
veals a specifically ‘headless’ anarchist logic of the
state. In Bataille’s work on political economy the
base metaphysical concept of the general state has
described the law from which the general economy
secures its wealth. Befittingly, I am charting out two
paths by way of a dialogue between each uniquely
situated philosophy. On the one hand, I shall pro-
vide entry-points or interventions into Bataille’s
discourse from the position of anarchist philosophy
and, on the other hand, I shall provide entry-points
or interventions into the anarchist discourse from
the position of the innermost outside of anarchist
philosophy (Bataille’s discourse). I bring this section
to a close by describing a baseless ethics of sacrifice.
According to Bataille, the ethical act is the one that
does not get coded into the symbolic order, this, I
argue, is sacrifice read a la lettre.

The Failure of Reading Bataille

Any inquiry into the nature of Georges Bataille’s
troublesome relationship with Marxism appears to
me to be a matter of banality. In any case, this vex-
ing relationship is by now a matter of the common

205

knowledge (cf., Grindon, 2010; Richardson, 1994:
1-4; Shershow, 2001; Hutnyk, 2003; for an ac-
count of the incommensurability of Marxism and
Bataille’s philosophy see Botting & Wilson, 1991:
9-10; Hollier, 1990) and its elaboration proves
trivial if one is interested in performing in writing
(and exposing through theory) the truth inherent
to Bataille’s oeuvre . Z6 Likewise, recent attempts to
situate Bataille as the ex post facto father figure of a
distinctly post-structuralist/post-modernist lineage
have not been met by idle pens (cf., Dorfman, 2002:
et passim, Jay, 2005: 361-400, et passim, Lechte,
1994: 108-36, et passim, Noys, 2000: 1, 16-17,
100-2, 130-5, 168, et passim). For instance, not
long after Bataille’s death Tel Quel — an avant-garde
literary journal operating out of Paris at the time —
had incisively granted Bataille this appropriate dis-
tinction — the irony of which became exposed as the
occurrence preceded the popularization of structur-
alist thought itself (Botting & Wilson, 1991; 5-7,
esp. page 6). What remains to be excavated from
Bataille’s texts is the nature of his commitment to
that proud adversary of Marxist thought, anarchism.

26 I am moved by Lacans insistence on the dominance of the style of

writing. In the opening sentence to Bruce Finks s 2006 edition of Ecrits
Lacan is quoted: “The style is the man himself” (Lacan, 2006c: 3). As one
blogger put it: “Lacan is incredibly concerned with style, how the person
is revealed through his language, and [he] seems incredibly careful with
his” (La Relation d’Objet, 2009).

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post-anarchism

This venture resolves itself into a central problem-
atic: one can not subscribe Bataille to any political
philosophy while remaining faithful to the truth of
his work — and yet, my claim is that there is some-
thing within Bataille’s work that lends itself to an
anarchistic interpretation.

I have argued in the first section of this book
that the psychoanalytic tradition has revealed a hid-
den dimension within every discourse. There is a side
that appears objectively within sight (the manifest
content) but there is also a side that remains for-
ever out of view (the latent content). While there is
a truth that occurs by way of appearances, this truth
is always disrupted by an aggrandized truth that re-
fuses to be contained by appearances alone. This lat-
ter force is truth proper — it is the source of truth —
because it temporarily sustains the cohesion prom-
ised by the appearance: “[Ajppearance constitutes a
limit [but] what truly exists is a dissolution” (Bataille,
2004: 173). 27 There are thus truths which appear
and also truths which elude appearances. To bring
this metaphor of the appearance to its full effect, Ba-
taille argued that “[i]t is the aperture which opens the
possibility of vision but which vision cannot compre-
hend visually” (Noys, 2000: 30). Truth proper, like

27 In this sense the word “dissolution” means “frivolity, moral laxness,
dissolute living” ( circa late- 14c; as retrieved from etymonline.com on
January 28, 2011).

207

the aperture, is the source of the appearance which at
once sustains and eludes the appearance.

The full discovery of this field occurred apro-
pos Lacan as a retort to the failure of post- 1920s
analytic psychoanalysis and its inability to quell the
analysand’s resistance to psychoanalytic interpreta-
tion. Conventional psychoanalytic methodologies
demonstrated an inability to predict and overcome
the integration of their discourse into the common
knowledge of the public. The analysand’s resistance
to analysis thereby stemmed from the predictability
of the meaning ascribed to her symptom by the ana-
lyst. In a word, analysands no longer succumbed to
the shock of analysis because this shock was replaced
by ubiquitous predictability. Lacan believed that ac-
cess to truth derived not from meaning but rather
from the shock of the treatment itself. To combat
the analysand’s resistance to interpretation, Lacan
proposed that analysts reformulate the ceremonious
methodologies of Freudian psychotherapy. In point
of fact, Lacan reread the truths of the Freudian trad-
ition. Henceforth the Lacanian school of psycho-
analysis called for analysts to move away from the
seductive methodology of interpretation — whereby
the analyst decoded the manifest content in order
to reveal an objectively observable latent content —
and to move toward the disruption of the meaning-
production process itself (cf., nosubject.com, 2011).

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post-anarchism

Lacan lucidly informed us that “analysis reveals the
truth [...] by making holes in meaning the determin-
ants of its discourse” (Lacan, [1960] 2006d: 678).
Yet, the production of meaning during analysis was
always an immanent consequence of treatment — as
an analyst, one can not sit quietly and expect the
analysand to overcome her neurosis or perversion
miraculously, similarly one can not interject into
the totality of the analysand’s utterances. Instead,
interpretations after Lacan were to aim toward the
production of ‘effects’ which may or may not corres-
pond to the apparent facts of the discourse, these ef-
fects were to provide points of departure for rethink-
ing the symbolism (or recirculating the signifiers) of
the discourse at hand (nosubject.com, 201 1).

Bataille shared Lacan’s distrust of meaning-
production processes — Bataille’s entire work de-
pended quite fundamentally upon this distinction
between the latent truth and manifest truths: “[y]
ou must know, first of all, that everything that has
a manifest side also has a hidden side. Your face
is quite noble, there’s a truth in your eyes with
which you grasp the world, but your hairy parts
underneath your dress are no less a truth than your
mouth is” (Bataille, 1997). This is to say that Ba-
taille’s entire exposition intended to produce effects
of consciousness in the reader’s own discourse but
also in the discourse with which Bataille conveyed

209

this meaning. The latent truth thus cross-cuts
every discourse precisely where they are lacking
in knowledge. It is not therefore at the level of ap-
pearances that anarchism and Bataille’s discourse
converge (or that the one appropriates the truths
of the other) but it is much rather in their mutual
disruption of the order of appearances from within
a latent discourse that is permitted within either of
the two philosophical systems. Whereas anarchist
philosophy has theorized a truth that occurs out-
side of the logic of the state-form, Bataille’s phil-
osophy has theorized a truth that occurs outside of
the logic of homogeneity. 28

However, Bataille’s use of the concept was
much more of a description for a manifest way of
thinking — Bataille was describing a particular dis-
cursive arrangement or a particular state of mind
that manifests itself politically and socially. Bataille
argued that “[h]omogeneity signifies [...] the com-
mensurability of elements and the awareness of this
commensurability: human relations are sustained
by a reduction to fixed rules based on the conscious-
ness of the possible identity of delineable persons
and situations; in principle, all violence is excluded
from this course of existence” (1985: 137-8). This

28 Homogeneity, in contrast to heterogeneity, has been described
by Richardson as “an organised society based upon inflexible law and
cohesion” (Richardson, 1994: 35).

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toward an ethics

implies that homogeneous social arrangements
are sustained, firstly, by meta-ethics, whereby Ba-
taille’s reduction to ‘persons’ answers positively to
the question of place and his reduction to ‘situa-
tions’ answers positively to the question of process.
Apropos this description of the logic of homogeneity,
in “The Psychological Structure of Fascism” Bataille
unwittingly described that feature of the state-form
previously held by anarchists. The restrictive state-
form, according to Bataille, is a manifestation of the
homogeneous logic of self-preservation, it always
serves the interests of those in power — thus, the
State “must constantly be protected from the vari-
ous unruly elements that do not benefit from pro-
duction” (Bataille, 1985: 139).

The wastage of productive processes have
manifested themselves into various identities of
resistance over the years, including, classically, the
proletariat and, more recently, the multitude. Re-
cently, these identities of resistance have given
way to a peculiarly post-structuralist logic of so-
cial movements. By way of the description of the
homogeneous state-form Bataille also described a
peculiar logic employed by the heterogeneous por-
tions of society that ostensibly break apart from the
homogeneity of state logic — elsewhere, Richard J. F.
Day has described this as the logic of demand:

By [the logic of demand] I mean to refer to

211

actions oriented to ameliorating the prac-
tices of states, corporations and everyday
life, through either influencing or using
state power to achieve irradiation effects
[...] it can change the content of struc-
tures of domination but it cannot change
their form [...] every demand, in anticipat-
ing a response, •perpetuates these struc-
tures, which exist precisely in anticipation
of demands (Day, in Rousselle & Evren,

2011: 107).

Similarly, Bataille argued that “the function
of the State consists of an interplay of authority
and adaptation [...] The reduction of differences
through compromise in parliamentary practice
indicates all the possible complexity of the internal
activity of adaptation required by homogeneity
[...] But against forces that cannot be assimilated,
the State cuts matters short with strict authority”
(Bataille, 1985: 139).

Whereas Day found an alternative to the self-
preserving logic of the state -form in the practices of
the ‘newest social movements,’ whose autonomy
was said to render state -logic redundant, 29 Bataille’s

29 As Day has put it: “[this] aims to reduce [the] efficacy [of
state-logic] by rendering them redundant. [It] therefore appears
simultaneously as a negative force working against the colonization of

212

toward an ethics

perspective offers little hope for autonomous eth-
ical activity because, quite simply, there is no place
from which to mount a resistance (no proletariat, no
multitude, no social movements at all). For Bataille,
the State depends upon all fixed ethical activity: “the
State derives most of its strength from spontaneous
homogeneity, which it fixes and constitutes as the
rule. [...] [Isolated individuals increasingly consider
themselves as ends with regard to the state” (Ba-
taille, 1985: 139). On the other hand, real hetero-
geneity can not be defined around the principles of
social movement theory because it cuts through any
models that would pretend to contain it — hetero-
geneity is the refusal of discourse as such (and yet it
also flows through discourse). As Jesse Goldhammer
has put it, “[Heterogeneity] encompasses everything
that is unproductive, irrational, incommensurable,
unstructured, unpredictable, and wasteful” (Gold-
hammer, 2005: 169). In this sense, Bataille’s work
criticizes any radical identity, it refuses all such at-
tempts to translate negative truths into positive
experiments. To be sure, it is also a claim made
against the predictability of unpredictability, as the
manifestation of spontaneous resistance or anarch-
ist experimentation as the law. The proletariat in
Bataille’s work is thus to be regarded as one of his

everyday life by the state [...] and a positive force acting to reverse this
process” (Day in Rousselle & Evren, 2011: 112).

213

‘approximations’ or ‘effects,’ rather than as the har-
binger of his truth.

Bataille’s refusal of the positive also led him
to trace a logic of duality inherent to movements
of heterogeneity. For example, Bataille has distin-
guished between a heterogeneity that occurs within
the ‘positive’ content of any discourse and a hetero-
geneity that occurs exclusively within the ‘negative’
content: “the general positive character of hetero-
geneity [...] does not exist in a formless and disori-
ented state: on the contrary, it constantly tends to a
split-off structure; and when social elements pass
over to the heterogeneous side, their action still
finds itself determined by the actual structure of
that side" (italics in original; Bataille, 1985: 141).
Hence there is a determined relationship upon
the positive heterogeneous social movements by
the homogeneity of state logic. To the extent that
manifest positive statements in social movement
discourse attempt to disrupt state-logic it occurs in
obverse proclamations, in their untranslated ethical
systems — in secret. What room Bataille has grant-
ed to revolutionary formations, or more broadly to
ethical activity, is best summarized by his insistence
that, in democratic states, “it is only the very nearly
indifferent attitude of the proletariat that has per-
mitted these countries to avoid fascist formations”
(Bataille, 1985: 159). There is thus ample room to

214

toward an ethics

conclude that the nihilist anarchism I have striven
to describe converges with these readings of Bataille.
However, as I have insisted elsewhere, the result of
this convergence proves itself to be paradoxical. At
the level of meta-ethics, the c factor of anarchism,
and the central preoccupation of Bataille, there is an
obvious parallel: an ethics that rejects all authority
and representation, an ethics that refuses to settle
into the territory of the manifest content — in a word,
an ethics of disruption. Both discourses converge by
way of their negative attributes, by way of what they
reject in the world.

Nonetheless, my argument is that any claim
of a convergence of anarchist philosophy with Ba-
taille’s philosophy must be met with suspicion. We
must take seriously the question of appropriation
when reading any work that attempts to fit Bataille
into a pre-existing political tradition. Any approach
that reduces the complexity of Bataille’s oeuvre
to a political categorization implies a fundamen-
tal misreading of the work (Noys, 2000: 52). We
must also be suspicious of any interpretation of
Bataille’s work. For instance, hermeneutical inves-
tigations into the truth of the text have tended to
oscillate between readings of the objective text and
interpretations by the subject while never settling
upon either of the two poles (cf., Skinner, 2002).
That is, truth is found between the two poles rath-

215

er than anywhere else — there are thus multiple/
relative truths granted to any historically situated
text. Hence, political appropriations have evaded
the (universal) truth inherent to Bataille’s antag-
onistic propositions. But, as I have said, Bataille’s
truth also eludes all positive interpretations (Noys,
2000: 105) and thereby challenges hermeneut-
ical methodologies on their presupposition of an
intersubjective dimension (or of a ‘letter that al-
ways reaches its recipient’). The problem of read-
ing Bataille amounts to a central question about
faith: how can it be that Bataille is being faithful
if, in considering the truth of his text ‘to the let-
ter’, we end up none the wiser? The paradox is that
Bataille ‘was’ and ‘was not’ being faithful to us in
his pronouncements: “A book that no one awaits,
that answers no formulated question, that the au-
thor would not have written if he had followed its
lesson to the letter — such is finally the oddity that
today I offer the reader [...] This invites distrust at
the outset” (Bataille, 1991: 11). The seduction of
the propositions in Bataille’s oeuvre enters by way
of the negative expression of truth rather than by
way of its positive manifestations. His text is a de-
scription of its failure and his positive propositions
are metaphors that allow us only a fleeting glimpse
of his truth. Conversely, hermeneutical methods
reduce this negative expression to a positive doc-

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toward an ethics

trine by rendering the heterogeneous descriptions
into homogeneous utterances (or positive hetero-
geneities). Hermeneuti cists are intent on revealing
only the discoverable portions of the text. Noys was
acutely aware of Bataille’s struggle to write the his-
tory of the unfinished system of non-knowledge:
The play of [heterogeneity] dominates
not only Bataille’s writing but also that
of those who try to interpret his texts.
Bataille was [...] trying to describe an [...]
economy, one that no writing, or any
other action, could reckon without and
could never entirely reckon with. This
means that to write about Bataille is to
be forced to engage with the effects of
[this] economy that is not dominated by
either Bataille or his readers. [...] [This]
economy is an economy of difference
that is irreducible either to a universal
law or to a particular context or, to use
the terminology of philosophy, it is nei-
ther transcendental nor empirical [...] it
can never be reduced to the empirical
description of this play of forces (Noys,

2000 : 123 ).

In this sense hermeneutics is the empirical
examination of the manifest content that takes

217

the form of a conclusive interpretation — a read-
ing of the other through the language of the other
(and, one might add, the other as an ontological re-
sponse to place). As Demeterio has put it “[i]n its
barest sense, hermeneutics can be understood as
a theory, methodology and praxis of interpretation
that is geared towards the recapturing of meaning
of a text, or a text-analogue, that is temporally or
culturally distant, or obscured by ideology and false
consciousness” (Demeterio, 2007). But Noys has
gone to great lengths to argue that the proper way
to read Bataille is to disband with an interpretation
that aims toward any meaningful conclusion (Noys,
2000: 1 26). Noys provided access to Bataille’s truth
by way of a paradox: “If we had never read Bataille
at all then we would be the best readers of Bataille,
but we would never know this unless we had read
Bataille” (Noys, 2000: 128).

The problem of arriving at the meaningful con-
clusion embedded within the manifest content is
also the problem of reaching an orientation in rela-
tion to the text. Like Lacanian methodologies, Ba-
taille’s epistemology aimed toward disorientation
rather than orientation, as Noys has argued: “Ba-
taille begins reading in an experience of disorienta-
tion, of impossibility. After announcing in Guilty
that reading is impossible and that he has lost the
urge to read, Bataille starts to read” (Noys, 2000:

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toward an ethics

128). We shall also notice that this disorientation
occurs at the level of meta-ethics while the ability
to read a manifest truth occurs at the level of eth-
ics — as I have said elsewhere in this essay, a nihil-
ist meta-ethics does not preclude the possibility for
ethical action. To be sure, I do not mean for this to
imply that the ethical act was encoded within his
meta-ethical system, it was not — it was evident only
as the failure of the encoding process itself, even
the descriptions of this failure have ultimately met
failure. At this point I would like to begin to pose
the question: at the level of politics, who fails better
than the anarchist?

Bataille’s writing is an attempt at failure, but
we can not ignore that he also writes about this
failure. The reading of the failure produces sense
where there is none. To read Bataille implies that
one be “led [...] against those readings which try to
appropriate a sense out of his heterogeneity” (Noys,
2000: 117). Bataille was not referring to a truth
inherent to the difference of the text in the positive
sense (a positive heterogeneity) but rather the truth
of the remainder of the text, he was referring to its
excremental portion which takes the appearance of
the repressed content. The meaningful conclusion
implied in the hermeneutic reading of the text
comes as a result of an attempt to appropriate that
which forever exposes a primordial incompleteness

219

and instability. Hermeneutics therefore sutures
the gap between the truth of his text (its absolute
otherness) and its positive propositions as an
‘other’ — at the very least, interpretations of his work
ought to aim toward what I have earlier described
as ‘effects.’ Once again, on this point Noys’s work
has been instructive:

[E]ven the most complete appropria-
tion is haunted by a heterogeneity that
it can never completely absorb. It is this
remainder that makes reading possible,
that reopens new possibilities of read-
ing while remaining impossible to read.
Theoretical appropriation succeeds but
at the cost of reducing the object to a
dead thing, to freezing the play of dif-
ference into a stable arrangement (Noys,
2000 : 126 ).

This excrement forever radiates outward from
the discourse, awaiting revelation, and yet it also
prevents the closure of any system or foundation
which seeks to advance beyond this nihilist founda-
tion. For this reason there is no ethical act proper
except the one that remains uncoded. Bataille made
a metaphor of this uncoded ethical gesture by way
of the dying criminal: “What is not useful must
hide itself (under a mask). Addressing himself to

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toward an ethics

the crowd, a dying criminal was the first to formu-
late this commandment : ‘Never confess’” (Bataille,
2001: 79). But whether or not one performs an
ethical act does not change the original condition,
this condition propels the species within their web
of language. Any system of knowledge, including
the most radical, is thereby destined toward failure.
Noys claimed that,

The philosopher picks through the waste
of what remains after appropriation, and
this is what attracts Bataille to philoso-
phy. However, although philosophy does
not leave anything out, including waste
products, the problem is that it appropri-
ates that waste as part of a new intellec-
tual system. [...] After Nietzsche, Bataille
will no longer understand philosophy as
a discourse of truth but as a discourse
that is unstable and impure (italics in
original; Noys, 2000: 39).

The argument that Noys was raising, through
Bataille, relates also to the problem of academic
knowledge (or the discourse of the university). More-
over, it relates fundamentally to the claim made in
the earlier part of my essay that the conceptual sys-
tems I have fashioned for the purposes of this thesis
are destined toward failure. In this way, Noys has

221

also argued that Bataille’s work does not lend itself
easily to the appropriative and/or exclusionary epis-
temological processes of academia (cf., Noys, 2000:
2), let alone the naive and reductive hermeneuticism
that aims toward meaningful conclusions. Rather,
we are met by two problematic movements which
occur as if toward opposing poles. On the one hand,
we may discuss the appropriation of the truth inher-
ent in Bataille’s oeuvre which occurs by way of gross
reductions in an otherwise negative heterogeneous
system of writing. On the other hand, the rejection of
the truth inherent in Bataille’s oeuvre occurs by way
of a gross repression of the heterogeneous base force
Bataille sought to describe. Whether by appropria-
tion or rejection, the truth inherent in Bataille’s text
transcends all philosophical speculations that seek/
sought to reduce being to a presence rather than to
its full spectrum of attributes. “What Bataille re-
quires,” Noys wrote, “is a reading that respects the
heterogeneity of his thought, a thought that is of and
at the limit” (Noys, 2000: 4). It is this reading that
guides the writing of my essay.

Beneath the General Economy,

The General State

Bataille distinguished between two levels of
economy. On the one hand, he described the econ-
omy we are already familiar with, the one theorized

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toward an ethics

by countless political economists to this day. This
economy is the economy of the particular, its logic
is derived from the generalization of isolatable in-
stances. Its laws are based on calculation, profit-
ability, and useability. But Bataille insisted that one
can not discover the general movement of the econ-
omy with the mind of a mechanic whose knowledge
about the whole comes only from his knowledge of
the problems within the particular automobile. The
problem of conventional economics has therefore
also been the problem of the fallibility of the logic of
utility. It is possible to imagine an economy whose
energy is fuelled by squander rather than by profit,
an economy that disrupts the logic of utility and in
doing so provides the impetus for future economic
arrangements. In the movement from the one econ-
omy to the other one also moves from the particu-
lar standpoint to the general standpoint. “Between
[the] production of automobiles and the general
movement of the economy,” Bataille wrote, “the
interdependence is rather clear, but the economy
taken as a whole is usually studied as if it were a
matter of an isolatable system of operation” (Ba-
taille, 1991: 19). Hence, the restrictive economy
depends upon the logic of utility within a delimited
domain of material supply; restrictive economy is
thereby an economy of scarcity. In classical polit-
ical philosophy, this scarcity is the cause for social

223

war which in turn has provided the need, ostensibly,
for the state-form as an arbiter — if, for example,
there are not enough resources to be shared there
is reason to believe that those who are best able to
present the appearance of threat stand to benefit
the most from the social war of all against all. Con-
versely, Bataille argued that the general economy
depends upon the logic of destructive expenditure,
of useless waste, within a limitless domain of ma-
terial supply; general economy is thereby an econ-
omy of excess, an economy of wealth. As Bataille
has put it, “[f]rom the 'particular point of view,
the problems are posed in the first instance by a
deficiency of resources [...] They are posed in the
first instance by an excess of resources if one starts
from the general point of view” (italics in original;
Bataille, 1993: 39). To adopt the vantage point
of the general economy is thus to begin from the
presumption of surplus rather than scarcity — u [o]n
the whole a society always produces more than is
necessary for its survival; it has a surplus at its dis-
posal” (Bataille, 1993: 106) — and to thus under-
mine the raison d'etre of the state-form in liberal
political philosophy. Moreover, as I have said, this
surplus ensures the continual growth of particular
economies of scarcity — “[t]he surplus is the cause
of the agitation, of the structural changes and of
the entire history of society” (Bataille, 1993: 106).

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toward an ethics

That the particular economies are founded
upon the general economy does not imply that they
are embodiments of this economy — instead, they
reveal an altogether different truth whereby the par-
ticular economy takes on a short truthful life of its
own independent from the underlying truth of the
general economy. In contrast to the particular econ-
omy, the general economy is grounded upon an in-
ability toward closure and thereby threatens and in-
deed overcomes the limits imposed by the restrictive
economies. In time, the general economy is a rejec-
tion of the particular economy but it is also the as-
surance of the life and the regeneration of particular
economies throughout time. In describing the gen-
eral economy, Bataille thus undermined the privil-
eged and long-held axioms of conventional political
and economic philosophy and subjected them to a
superior law and economy. He exposed the extent to
which the state-form (which emerged as a supposed
arbiter over the social war that ostensibly occurred
by way of scarcity) and the capitalist economic form
(which emerged as a supposed assurance of a life
endlessly moving away from a needs-based econ-
omy; cf., Zizek, 2005b) were grounded upon the in-
tensive logic of the latent content: within this logic
it is not acquisition but expenditure which reigns.
The latent content is the ungovernable portion of
the state-ment, its truth is revealed by the endless

225

disruption of manifest state-ments. For Bataille, the
restrictive “state [...] cannot give full reign to a move-
ment of destructive consumption” (Bataille, 1993:
160) it must therefore obey the laws of expenditure
in order to achieve a semblance of authority over a
period of time with relative success. In this regard,
“exchange presents itself as a process of expenditure,
over which a process of acquisition has developed”
(Noys, 2000: 108) — there is a primordial truth-
claim being made: “For Bataille economy, and es-
pecially modem restricted economics in its capitalist
form, is secondary to the primacy of this process of
expenditure and loss” (ibid.).

Bataille also forced us to think outside of the
narrow definition of restrictive economies and to
think of economic activity as occurring across abroad
range of domains, including, probably at its broadest
level, discourse (Noys, 2000: 104). Here, my claim
is not without warrant: “The accursed share disrupts
the discourse it is being sketched out by” (Noys,
2000: 104). In this way, Bataille saw his work as
an embarrassment to traditional political economy,
it was interdisciplinary by design and it brought all
discursive systems into question by exposing their
inability to quell the forces of the general economy:
This [...] addresses, from outside the
separate disciplines, a problem that still
has not been framed as it should be, one

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toward an ethics

that may hold the key to all the problems
posed by every discipline concerned with
the movement of energy on the earth —
from geophysics to political economy,
by way of sociology, history and biol-
ogy. Moreover, neither psychology nor,
in general, philosophy can be considered
free of this primary question of economy.

Even what may be said of art, of litera-
ture, of poetry has an essential connec-
tion with the movement I study (Bataille,

1993 : 10 ).

We may say, with Bataille rather than against
him, that the general economy also brought his dis-
course into question. Hermeneutical readings of Ba-
taille are forced to focus on his restrictive discourse
rather than his general discourse, the performance
of the hermeneutical gesture itself opposes the
general truth circulating within Bataille’s restrict-
ive discourse. Hermeneutics misses the description
of that which does not manifest itself within any
text, the part of the text that connects with all other
discourses into a common movement, a common
(w)hole. This, Bataille has called La Part Maudite
(translated as ‘The Accursed Share’). The accursed
share is the waste product of discourse that explodes
forth from a radically foreign outside to all restrictive

227

discourses that seek to contain it. Nevertheless, the
hermeneutical misreading lies dormant, as a poten-
tiality, within any such discourse — the medium of
language always reduces the general economy to a
particular arrangement of appearances:

This close connection between general
economy and existing economies always
makes it possible to reduce general econ-
omy to a set of economic relations. It also
means that the data that Bataille uses to
provide ‘approximations’ of the accursed
share is easily reversible and instead the
accursed share can become another eco-
nomic fact (Noys, 2000: 117).

The accursed share is the non-recuperable por-
tion that exists outside of every economy, its prom-
ise is the immediate and eventual destruction of any
system or foundation that appears to contain it. It is
the anarchist current that has always existed with
or without human intervention, with or without the
subject as the locus of ethical agency. Any ‘approxi-
mation’ is a betrayal, a violence posed against the
laws of the La Part Maudite.

Once again, there is an apparent relationship
between Bataille and Marxist political philosophy.
Like Marx, Bataille sought to describe the logic of
failure inherent to capitalism from the perspec-

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toward an ethics

tive of political economy. However in doing so Ba-
taille greatly surpassed the restricted logic at play
in Marx’s own texts (and this may very well be be-
cause Marx did not elaborate any ethical system
or foundation for bis work). But whereas Marxist
political philosophy has centred upon its critique of
conventional economics (even while it did not per-
form a complete break from the logic of utility, and,
more problematically, from idealism ) , 30 anarchist
political philosophy has centred upon a critique of
the state-form. Nevertheless, one detects a peculiar
omission in the writings of Georges Bataille which
no doubt stems from his desire to mythologize the
discourse of scarcity and endless productivity per-
vasive in the work of the political economists of the
time. While it was no doubt important to explore
the notion of general economy founded upon the
metaphysical principles of excess and limitless con-
sumption, Bataille’s work does not give a name to
the metaphysical principles regulating this econ-
omy. At the restrictive level, this problem has the
analogy best exhibited by the traditional anarchist
critique against the political logic of the Marxists.

The oft-cited nineteenth century anarchists
(shamefully, I will restrict my focus to Mikhail Baku-
nin and Petr Kropotkin) set out to discover a fun-

30 An implicit critique of Marxisms idealism was provided in Bataille' s
“ Base Materialism,” an essay available in the Visions of Excess collection.

229

damentally different political logic which was to be
distinguished from the Marxist logic of class inher-
ent in the base/superstructure synthetic pair. What
they found was that the Marxist analysis of polit-
ical oppression neglected the self-perpetuating and
independent logic of the state and that, according
to Bakunin (and echoed by countless anarchists to
this day), the Marxists “do not know that despot-
ism resides not so much in the form of the state but
in the very principle of the state and political power”
(Bakunin, 1984: 220). For the classical anarchists,
the State — as the fundamental apparatus of power
in society — represented the barbarity of the transfer
of power from the people (the repressed content)
to the tyrannical group. The classical anarchists
thereby argued that the state was the ultimate riddle
of power and must therefore be understood as the
guarantor of wealth for the bourgeoisie.

With Bataille, we may carry the discoveries of
the classical anarchist logic even further. In the re-
strictive sphere we may say the following: if, for the
classical Marxists, the domain of class referred also
to the domain of utility then, for the anarchists, we
may properly deduce that the domain of the state
referred also to the domain of routine. With this in-
terpretation we might understand anew the connec-
tion Kropotkin envisioned between capitalism and
the state when he proclaimed that “the state [...] and

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toward an ethics

capitalism are facts and conceptions which we can-
not separate from each other [...] [i]n the course of
history these institutions have developed, supporting
and reinforcing each other” (Kropotkin, [2005]:
159). The state therefore instituted into logical time
what was previously cast to the instant, outside of
the authority of time. The instant as a movement
outside of means and ends. Thus, we have found
that it is not the restrictive economy that poses the
greatest threat to sovereignty, but the restrictive state:
“what is sovereign in fact is to enjoy the present time
without having anything else in view but this present
time” (Bataille, 1993: 199). It is therefore a mat-
ter of separating, analytically, that which manifests
itself co-constitutively in the restrictive economy and
restrictive state, where the logic of each occur or are
the seeds for the other. As Saul Newman has put it,
“[a]narchism sees the state as a wholly autonomous
and independent institution with its own logic of
domination” ([2001] 2007: 21). Bakunin, perhaps
the classical anarchist with the most to say about the
state-form, has similarly put it:

The State is authority, it is force, it is the
ostentatious display of and infatuation
with Power. It does not seek to ingrati-
ate itself, to win over, to convert. Every
time it intervenes, it does so with par-
ticularly bad grace. For by its very nature

231

it cannot persuade but must impose and
exert force. However hard it may try to
disguise this nature, it will still remain
the legal violator of man's will and the
permanent denial of his liberty (Bakunin,
1953 ).

The problem of focusing only on problems of
the economy is also the problem of ignoring the
independent self-serving logic of the state-form.
Anarchists have long argued that it is in the interest
of the state to maintain its legislating power over
the people — it is short-sighted to provide a telos of
revolution without taking the autonomous and self-
serving logic of the state-form into account.

I have shown that Bataille has outlined a
general economic model that intervenes into the
restrictive capitalist economic model, it shall now
be demonstrated that there is an independent logic
of the state-form which also occurs from within the
general perspective. Just as one can speak about
matters of the general economy, one may also speak
of matters of the general state. Bataille sufficiently
intimated the logic of the general state but he did
not give it a name (such as he did with the ‘general
economy’)- In the second chapter of The Accursed
Share he described the “Laws of General Economy”
and hence argued that the general economy is the

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toward an ethics

one that is governed by an authority far greater
than its own (Bataille, 1993: 27). To the extent,
therefore, that the restrictive state, according to
Bataille, is homogeneity and routine, the general
state is heterogeneity and disruption.

We may say that the logic of the economy oc-
curs within the range of responses to the question
of process in meta-ethical philosophy whereas the
logic of the state -form occurs within the range of re-
sponses to the question of place. Processes occur by
way of economies, they are circulations and have all
the properties of movements/fe/o.?. Places occur by
way of state-forms, they are locations and have all
the properties of spaces/categorizations. The econ-
omy originates, according to Bataille, in a place and
that place is the sun: “The origin and essence of our
wealth are given in the radiation of the sun, which
dispenses energy — wealth — without return. The sun
gives without ever receiving” (Bataille, 1991: 28).
Bataille continued, “the brilliance of the sun [...]
provokes passion. It is not what is imagined by those
who have reduced it to their poverty; [...] the least
that one can say is that the present forms of wealth
make a shambles and a human mockery of those
who think they own it” (italics in original; Bataille,
1991: 76). Unpacking all of this, it becomes clear
that, at the very least, economies concern them-
selves with production and consumption, but states

233

concern themselves with distribution. In the general
perspective, there is a state that distributes scarce
matter and there is a solar state (approximately), or
aperture, that distributes the wealth. In this sense,
the economy does not emerge from within the
circulation of its own energy but much rather from a
place outside of our living sphere, a place of pure ex-
ternality. The economy emerges from a foreign place
that is too hot to touch and too bright to see. We
can only come to know the general state from afar,
through plays with language, through approxima-
tions, through failure. We may never own this place
because it is not an objective entity, but neither is
it subjective. It is abject , it cuts through the subject
and the object from a location of pure intimacy.

Bataille provided several approximations of
the general economy, from sacrifice and war to gift
and potlatch, but his overall point was to expose
the general economy as a movement of pure waste.
However, as I have suggested, there is also the prob-
lem of distribution in the restrictive sphere. In the
restrictive sense, then, we may say that there are,
broadly, communist, totalitarian, and liberal state-
forms. In form they embody the logic of the state, in
content they vary widely. I have described the logic
of the restrictive state-form earlier. Now we may
add that there are anarchist state -forms and that
these can only occur through the general perspec-

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toward an ethics

tive. To the extent that Bataille was outlining a non-
foundationalist epistemology through the negative
response to the question of process, he was also
describing a non-essentialist and non-representa-
tive ontology through the negative response to the
question of place. And therein one may discover his
anarchistic elaboration of the general state-form.
Just as there is a lack that sustains the economy of
our knowledge (language), there is also a lack that
sustains the state of our being. Thus, while post-
anarchism exposed the underside to traditional an-
archist meta-ethics as that which sustains its dis-
course, Bataille exposed the full range of the meta-
ethical framework: an underside to the question of
place and process. Next, I shall aim to elaborate the
implications of the general state for the realization
of the negative response to the question of place.

A Subject Without A State

To argue that Bataille’s work was primarily
about ethics — ethics of the second order — may
appear banal to the advanced reader of Bataille but
it shall prove important to establish this claim — my
argument very much depends upon it. Allan Stoekl
has argued that “Bataille [...] exerts a strong appeal
because he [...] seems to hold onto the possibility
of an ethics” (Stoekl, 1990: 2). To the extent that

235

this claim is true it merits considerable elaboration
in as much as Bataille was primarily interested in
overturning all ethical systems:

I will simply state, without waiting further,
that the extension of economic growth it-
self requires the overturning of economic
principles — the overturning of the eth-
ics that grounds them. Changing from
the perspective of restrictive economy to
those of general economy actually ac-
complishes a Copemican transformation:
a reversal of thinking — and of ethics (ital-
ics in original; Bataille, 1991: 23).

But Bataille’s project was not a transformation
of ethical philosophy. Rather, it was a disruption of
all ethical claims-making and a rejection of morality
as such. Benjamin Noys also endorsed this inter-
pretation of Bataille’s work: “If we read Bataille as
an ethical thinker [...] we [...] are not conceding to
the recent ethical turn in contemporary Continental
philosophy, which rehabilitates theology or mor-
alistic conceptions of the human subject” (Noys,
2005: 125). Contrarily, with Bataille we may firmly
reject all ethical conceptions of the subject in order
to “transgress the limits of ethics, as it is usually
conceived” (Noys, 2005: 125). Rather than re-
jecting restrictive ethical systems in favour of other

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toward an ethics

positive conceptions, Bataitte exposed the extent
to which all ethical systems have been subservi-
ent to a greater power than they sought to describe.
He thereby exposed an underside to meta-ethical
frameworks.

The meta-ethical claim that Bataille made,
apropos the general state, was that the subject is
no longer a place from which to gauge appropriate
human activity — she is ceaselessly subordinate to
general state power. To the extent that the general
state exists, it exists always elsewhere, in an
absolute otherness relation to consciousness. The
general state can never be encapsulated within the
play of signifiers but is instead the laws or grammar
of the disruption of this play. Unlike in Lacanian
or post-anarchist meta-ethics, whether or not one
gets into accord with this complex matters little in
the grand scheme of things. For Bataille, there is
no ethical act proper. Hence, unlike in traditional
anarchist philosophy, the subject no longer holds
the privileged place of political activity, rather her
actions are always encoded in her place by the
state-ment. Even considering this, this is still an
inversion of the deterministic conceptions of power
in relation to the restrictive state and the humanist
subject in traditional anarchist philosophy.

At times it appears as though Bataille has
adopted a base subjectivist response to the question

237

of place. There is a paradoxical relationship to the
general state that appears to become elucidated by
the ethical activity of self-reflection: “Doubtless it is
paradoxical to tie a truth so intimate as that of self-
consciousness (the return of being to full and irredu-
cible sovereignty) to these completely external deter-
minations” (italics in original; Bataille, 1991: 189).
Self-consciousness is the subject’s last resort to
overcome the anxiety of giving up control of a world
that is much rather controlled elsewhere and yet it is
also a means for the subject to overcome this anxiety.
Thus, self-consciousness takes on a different mean-
ing in Bataille’s work. It appears that in Bataille’s
work the intimacy of the world without the authority
of the subject can be achieved by the subject:

If self-consciousness is essentially the
full possession of intimacy, we must
return to the fact that all possession of
intimacy leads to a deception. A sacrifice
can only posit a sacred thing. The sacred
thing externalizes intimacy: it makes vis-
ible on the outside that which is really
within. This is why self-consciousness
demands finally that, in connection with
intimacy, nothing further can occur.

This comes down in fact, as in the ex-
perience of the mystics, to intellectual
contemplation, ‘without shape or form,’

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toward an ethics

as against the seductive appearances of
‘visions’, divinities and myths” (italics in
original; Bataille, 1991: 189).

The seduction of the subject as the locus of
ethical activity, according to Bataille, occurs be-
cause the subject is the place for the construction
of ‘myths’ — there is hence a parallel to the Lacan-
ian methodology. And yet intimacy occurs “with-
out shape or form” and thereby without myths. All
of Bataille's myths are approximations of intimacy,
they serve only as pathways toward intimacy or as
forms that are intended to seduce us into intel-
lectual contemplation. All positive elaborations on
meta-ethics go “against consciousness in the sense
that [they try] to grasp some object of acquisition,
something, not the nothing of pure expenditure. It
is a question of arriving at the moment when con-
sciousness will cease to be a consciousness of some-
thing'' (italics in original; Bataille, 1991: 1 9 0) . It is
only in the failure to think that Bataille’s subject of
intimacy comes into being.

Bataille was interested in releasing the subject
from the prison of her own subjectivity and this ac-
counts for his insistence that the subject ought to
aim toward “a consciousness that henceforth has
nothing as its object' (italics in original; Bataille,
2001: 190). Here, we are provided a useful point

239

of departure for rethinking and extending the base
subjectivist meta-ethics of such anarchists as Max
Stimer, Renzo Novatore, and others who argued
that “Nothing is more to me than myself!” (Stimer,
1907) in Stimer, and, in Novatore, the Nietzschean
proclamation that one ought to move “toward the
creative nothing” (Novatore, 1924). Yet the base
subjectivists have retained the corporeal subject as
the locus of ethical activity. They have proclaimed
with so much confidence: “I am not nothing in the
sense of emptiness, but I am the creative nothing,
the nothing out of which I myself as creator cre-
ate everything” (Stimer, 1907). Bataille’s sovereign
subject, on the other hand, is grounded upon a noth-
ingness of pure exteriority: “sovereignty is NOTH-
ING, a nothing that is a slipping away of the subject
[...] This slipping away is not secondary because it
does not happen to a subject who is secure or has
integrity, instead it reveals the unstable status of the
subject” (Noys, 2000: 75). To be sovereign is not
to make a conscious ethical choice, it is to recognize
the sovereignty of being that already exists and to
give oneself away to it from within the imaginary
of everyday consciousness. The sovereign subject
can thus not be reduced to the individual ego (Noys,
2000: 65) rather it is at once the movement of con-
sciousness that compels the subject to disrupt her
authority over her being, to take the proclamation

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toward an ethics

of non-being seriously (Noys, 2000: 65), and it is
the revelation of this accidentalism. There is thus a
shifting of priorities in the text of Renzo Novatore
when he insisted that he was an anarchist because
he was also a nihilist: “I call myself a nihilist be-
cause I know that nihilism means negation ” (italics
in original; Novatore, 1920), and then he claimed
that “[when] I call myself an individualist anarchist,
an iconoclast and a nihilist, it is precisely because
I believe that in these adjectives there is the high-
est and most complete expression of my willful and
reckless individuality” (Novatore, 1920). There is a
refusal in base subjectivist responses to the question
of place to think beyond the agency of subject. For
the base subjectivist, it is she who is responsible for
the negation and it is she who is responsible for the
creation that results from this evacuation of place.
The great battle is between the subject of the state-
ment and the creative subject of the no-thing. Con-
trarily, there is an anti -authoritarian dimension to
Bataille’s meta-ethical system in his subversion of
the authority of the conscious subject: “Sovereignty
is the contestation of authority, a reversal of our
traditional concepts of sovereignty” (Noys, 2000:
65). Just as the subject’s actions always fall within
the pervasive logic of the restrictive state, the sover-
eign subject’s (in)activity always falls within the per-
vasive logic of the general state.

241

There have been arguments against this reduc-
tion of sovereignty to an ontology of place (cf., Noys,
2000: 66 et passim). The problem is that some
readings of Bataille reduce sovereignty to an ontol-
ogy of the ego. Against this compulsion toward the
ontological, Derrida has argued that one ought to
‘read Bataille against Bataille’: “this diffusion resists
being condensed into an individual or into being” be-
cause it operates “at the limit” of the subject (Noys,
2000: 66). However, the question remains, in mov-
ing toward a faithful reading of Bataille that rejects
his manifest truth in favour of his latent truth, in re-
jecting the ontology of the subject, what remains?
To be sure, this remainder can only be thought
within the domain of meta-ethics because Bataille’s
heterogeneous writing crosscuts the ontological and
epistemological domains and exposes their mutual
constitution as meta-ethical frameworks. The sub-
ject is subservient only to the general state-form. She
serves the authority of the solar non-place. Benja-
min Noys’s argument that Bataille’s subject can only
be thought as ‘an effect’ or ‘temporary dam’ implies
that it can only be reduced to the homogeneity of
the manifest content. It is a truth, but not the truth
of Bataille’s text. Fittingly, Noys’s acute description
of Bataille’s subject as ‘an effect’ fits into the logic of
the ‘effect’ that Lacanian psychoanalysts have striv-
en to induce in their analysands. The solar non-place

242

toward an ethics

is thereby meta-ethics proper: it includes the author-
ity and place from whence ethics originate and the
knowledge and process through which this author-
ity speaks. As Noys put it: “Sovereignty does not
integrate into absolute knowledge but is the non-
knowledge that undermines it” (Noys, 2000: 79).
Sovereignty introduces the subject, fleetingly, to that
which is outside of herself, to that which is neither
‘individual’ nor ‘social’ (Noys, 2005: 128), “nei-
ther subject nor object” (Kristeva, 1982: 1), to that
which horrifies the subject and brings her to her limit
in death. It is precisely this thinking that destabil-
izes the base subjectivist position (cf., Noys, 2005:
128 et -passim, on the ‘psychoanalytic subject’). The
refusal of the subject is itself an ethics of disruption
and Bataille has called this ethics, ‘abjection’.

The question remains: if, as I have attempted
to demonstrate, Bataille’s meta-ethics are nihilist
in the strict sense of the term, then what may we
say about his first order ethics? Two further lines of
thought are required to develop a response to this
question. First, I shall aim to describe Bataille’s eth-
ics of abjection as the limit of the subject within the
domain of meta- ethical discourse and second I shall
aim to demonstrate that Bataille’s notion of ‘sacri-
fice’ offers us a chance to reformulate the challenge
of first order ethics.

243

From Abjection to Sacrifice, From Life to
Death and Back Again

The question remains, if the preoccupation of
the meta- ethical discourse hitherto described aims
only toward the disruption of ethical claims -making
and if Bataille’s meta-ethics rejects the subject as the
locus of ethical agency, then, I hesitate to ask, on
what basis might there be any pertinent political in-
volvement? To the extent that this question merits
a response I shall provide one based on the notions
of ‘abjection’ and ‘sacrifice’ in Bataille’s work. I shall
argue that sacrifice rescues ethics from the destruc-
tive trajectory of meta- ethics. After the slipping of the
subject in nihilist meta-ethics there is still room for
one to engage ethically in the world. However, the
response, once again, will prove itself paradoxical.

I have argued that the general state destabilizes
the subject as an ontological category and in doing
so it exposes the object of ethics proper — an ethics
of the outside that is mythologically associated with
the sun. According to Bataille, ethical activity is not
something the subject performs but rather it is some-
thing performed upon (and against) the subject by
the forces of an external nature. We may say that the
abject is the object of Bataille’s meta-ethical inquiry
and that it crosscuts positive conceptions of place
and process. Abjection is the effect of the general

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toward an ethics

economy on positive notions of place: “What opens
in this rupture, in this shattering of the subject, are
those states of abjection [...] They include death, ex-
cretions, objects of horror, ecstatic enjoyment (jouis-
sance) and so on, and are ‘things to be embraced,
not exactly willingly, but that must be addressed in
their horror’” (Noys, 2005: 131). The abject is what
remains after the imposition of the subject; fleeting
glimpses of this object are available through reduc-
tions in useful knowledge. It is only where knowledge
is lacking that the subject proper (Bataille’s intimate
or sovereign subject) comes into view.

I have also argued that Bataille’s meta-ethics
must be distinguished from base subjectivist under-
standings of place on the basis of this ethics of ab-
jection. Whereas base subjectivists have retained
the ethical agency of the subject, the base mater-
ialist philosophy of Georges Bataille rejected the
subject entirely and replaced it with the solar econ-
omy. Noys has broached this topic in various ways,
he has argued, for example, that “psychoanalysis
inclines to recover the subject” from the effects of
the Real, but “Bataille puts the subject into free
fall” (Noys, 2005: 131). It is therefore only a mat-
ter of convenience that scholars have traced a lin-
eage from Bataille to Lacan, from abjection to the
Real. But one must distinguish between the ethics
of psychoanalysis and the ethics of abjection on the

245

basis of the subject’s lost intimacy with the world
that surrounds her. As Noys has put it,

[Cjritics [have] assimilate[d] Bataille’s
thought to that of Lacan, especially see-
ing it as a prefiguration of Lacan’s concept
of the Real [...] The problem with these
arguments is that they tend to reduce Ba-
taille to a precursor to Lacan, missing the
complexity of Bataille’s own writings. In
particular, they risk subsuming Bataille
back within the Freudian field, rather
than attending to what in his work ‘eludes
psychoanalysis’ (Noys, 2005: 132).

The crucial distinction between Bataille’s con-
cept of abjection and Lacan’s concept of the Real
is that Bataille’s abjection “escapes the subject [...]
For Bataille the shattered subject is not gathered up,
even into the subject of the unconscious or the sub-
ject of abjection” (Noys, 2005: 132-3). How does
Bataille’s philosophy expose what is more Lacan
than Lacan? Bataille’s more Lacan than Lacan is,
precisely, in his ontologization of Lacan.

To the extent that an ethics beyond abjection
is possible it shall depend upon an elaboration of
the notion of sacrifice. I do not intend to perform
this daunting task here but I do intend to provide a
pathway for future work into the area. In “Sacrifi-

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toward an ethics

cial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van
Gogh,” Bataille described Van Gogh’s ethical sac-
rifice as the one that “spat in the faces of all those
who have accepted the elevated and official idea of
life that is so well known.” To the extent that eth-
ical activity exists in the world there shall never be
a meta-ethical system of knowledge to account for
it unless it is the description of its failure. My claim
is that sacrifice occurs where servitude is assumed.

Sacrifice occurs where servitude is assumed:
Bataille argued that sacrifice always “appears in our
eyes as servitude” (Bataille, 1985). If it is true that
sacrifice occurs where servitude is assumed perhaps
the appearance of servitude is the ethical act of sac-
rifice proper. The process of gift-giving, for example,
abides by a logic which exchanges “the materially
valuable for that which is culturally meaningful [...]
Sacrifice is the act of exchanging that which is valued
for meaning” (Thought Factory, 2004). The ethical
act is the one that gives up on trying to overcome
the problem of place and process and, instead, con-
cedes purposeful activity only to the abject. There is
thus a violence inherent to the ethical act but it is a
violence that radiates from the restrictive economies
and states of idealist culture rather than the violence
that disrupts these frameworks. To be sure, the me-
ta-ethical task falls into nihilism by virtue of a vio-
lence that exceeds the frameworks of any discourse

247

that seeks to contain it, but the ethical task is to give
in to the restrictive systems and foundations that
sustain life and to hence expose a violence against
the sacred intimacy that destabilizes the subject As
Noys argued, “Bataille wants to express a violence
that is radically beyond language, and he searches
for examples of this violence in acts of sacrifices [...]
The difficulty is that these examples reduce violence
back into language and into a particular historical
moment of subject [...] Violence exists somewhere in
the play of the example, existing through examples
but also ruining the idea of the example through a
violent opening” (italics in original; Noys, 2000: 10).

To give way to the abject implies two conse-
quences: on the one hand, it implies that all activity is
grounded upon failure and so too are the frameworks
which are presumed descriptions of this activity. Fail
again, fail better. The anarchists have never had a
victory and yet we find some pleasure in this defeat.
We fail better than any other political agent. But this
also means that there is a violence inflicted, in the
restrictive sense, through this activity. This thereby
explains the meaning of the following: “Sacrifice
exposes us to death but also saves us from death”
(Noys, 2000: 1 3). For the anarchist — it is a crime to
go to graduate school, get married, have children, or
otherwise reproduce the existing homogeneity, and
yet we know that the existing order is sustained by

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toward an ethics

a force much greater than the restrictive states and
economies that come and go through time. There is
an order of the symbolic that compels us into servi-
tude. Anarchists are often asked: what in this life is
anarchist? We may say that very little in life is an-
archist because every act is absorbed by the symbol-
ic order and provided with meaning and value. The
great sacrific t for an anarchist is thus to give oneself
away to tolerable systems and foundations and to be
stoned to death by her family, other anarchists, and
so on, for doing so. It means that there are sacrifices
that one has to make violently by both refusing meta-
ethical systems and foundations but also in accepting
certain ones as effects or approximations of anarch-
ism. The ethical task is not to sacrifice a king, but to
sacrifice ourselves to the king, to find in our sacrifice
to the king a sabotage of the king. Several years ago I
found myself in the middle of a political campaign at
my university. Anarchists were teamed with avowedly
Leninist political organizers on the political platform
‘United for Change.’ I was saddened by the amount
of recuperation happening in my milieu. I put up
posters in support of the group. However, I did so
before the permitted time and in volumes not per-
mitted by union regulation: I accepted their platform
too much. They were very nearly disqualified. As a
consequence, my anarchist friends called the police
on me, threatened legal action against me, and so on.

249

I was threatened with violence. Fireworks were shot
at my home, where my newborn baby slept. Letters
and photographs were placed all around the internet.
I was ex-communicated from the milieu. My pub-
lisher was notified that I was an agent provocateur,
working and being paid by the state. Nothing that the
sacrificed anarchist can say shall allow her to return
to intimacy, and yet everyday she strives to build a
better world anyway — a dying anarchist performs
this function in secret, much like the dying criminal
who “[a]ddresses himself to the crowd, a dying crim-
inal was the first to formulate this commandment:
‘Never confess’” (Bataille, 2001: 79). The anarchists
never ran for presidency again.

For Bataille, “[t]here is no [ethical] project;
[...] only the defeat of all accomplishment” (Stoekl,
1990: 4), we may also say that we have arrived at
a crucial paradox in the work of Bataille, one that
makes his ethical system tremble: as Stoekl has put
it: “therein lies the problem, because any ‘saying’
or ‘writing’ [or doing], no matter how disjointed or
disseminated, is already the product of a project, of a
constructive activity not different in kind from that of
the most servile ‘committed’ writer” (Stoekl, 1990:
4) . The problem i s that Bataille ’s meta- ethi cal system
appears to imply that the intimate subject ought no
longer to act in the world. Certainly, inactivity has its
place in any political program, but, at the same time,

250

toward an ethics

one can imagine scenarios in which this negative
proposition also falls flat into a stable doctrine. For
Stoekl, “Bataille can only be the ‘nothing’ and the
imposition and betrayal of that ‘nothing’ through the
coherent project of writing” (italics in original; Stoekl,
1990: 4). This betrayal, which occurs, I have argued,
as sacrifice, “opens, in turn, even larger vistas of
betrayal” (Stoekl, 1990: 4). Stoekl has taken this
logic to its limit:

So perhaps in Bataille there is the neces-
sity of morality and representation, no
matter how ‘accursed’, along with its
impossibility. There is the [...] betrayal of
the [...] ‘nothing’, elaborated at the ex-
pense of the ethical, and there is, in and
through that very writing, the impossi-
bility of maintaining its purity, and thus
the consequent, incessant, re-positing of
the ethical, even in the representation of
its defeat or sundering (Stoekl, 1990: 5).

Stoekl’s point is that through positive sacrificial
ethical acts there is the potential, but not the con-
clusion, of ever new opportunities for the exposition
of the nothing which founds and propels the spe-
cies. This claim is not without warrant: according to
Heimonet & Kohchi (1990) sacrifice, like the logic
of heterogeneity, occurs across two counterposing

251

dimensions. Heimonet & Kohchi describe sacrifice
as an “opening, a rendering apart, quartering of a
subject tensed for the leap but nevertheless held
back on the verge of the abyss of total alterity” (Hei-
monet & Kohchi, 1990: 227). The ‘leap’ carries
strong connotations with Soren Kierkegaard’s ‘leap
to faith’ whereby the intimate subject leaps into un-
certainty and thereby returns once again to intimacy.
Bataille’s infamous ethical imperative is that one
must ‘recoil in order to leap forward’. For Bataille,
one must move away from meta- ethics precisely to
understand meta-ethics but, without having jumped
into meta-ethics, he would have never arrived at this
conclusion! Inevitably, one must disrupt meta-eth-
ical systems to once againpartake in ethical practice.

There are thus two meanings by the concept
‘sacrifice’ in Bataille’s work. Heirmonet & Kohchi
have argued that these two concepts of sacrifice
“which are actually one, double or dual, at once
antithetical and complementary [...] correspond
to two moments in the experience and thought of
Bataille” (Heirmonet & Kohchi, 1990: 227). The
authors have argued that the first moment — what I
have called his meta-ethics — was characterized by
negativity. This was his radical or activist political
movement. The second moment was his theoretical

252

toward an ethics

movement. This was his secret, his silent, moment. 31
It should be noted that the first moment is political
only to the extent that it gives voice, however nega-
tive, to resistance whereas the latter moment exists
only within a theoretical domain, uncoded, untrans-
lated, without recuperation by the symbolic order —
a sacrifice proper. The second moment does not
provide any words on activity in the world — it is a
simple performance without law. In the end, these
two moments only exist by way of appearances (Hei-
monet & Kohchi, 1990: 228), there is actually no
separation of these movements — rather, they are a
“dialectically complimentarity” (Heimonet & Kohchi,
1990: 228). Sacrifice is thus the dialecticalization
of Bataille’s meta-ethical system and foundation, it
is the putting into practice of a failed proclamation:
“he [Bataille] suggests becoming silent and putting
into practice the excesses represented by the divine
Marquis” (Heimonet & Kohchi, 1990: 228).

The practice of sacrifice brings us to an under-
standing of the role of silence in radical activity. Si-
lence is a practice, but it is not the sort of practice
that is performed by intimate subjects, rather it is
that which interrupts the noise of ethical activity.

31 According to etymonline.com, theory, from the Greek theoria

(c.1590) means “contemplation, a looking at” — we may reformulate this
to imply a contemplation on intimacy, as described by Bataille through
the concept of sovereignty.

253

Silence is hence, according to Bataille, “a ques-
tion of speaking, silence being the last thing that
language can silence, and which language can-
not nonetheless take as its object without a kind
of crime” (Bataille in Mitchell & Winfree, 2009:
199). To the extent that sacrifice is a violence that
is inflicted upon the subject, it is also a refusal to
“declare either its own existence or its right to exist;
it simply exists” (Bataille, 1986: 188). After years
of contemplation on the subject of silence, Bataille
was forced to admit: “I know this now: I don’t have
the means to silence myself” (Bataille, 1986: 68).
The problem is that in the description of the fail-
ure of language one performs the contradiction of
expressing silence through language. I have hence
failed, as a criminal, to perform in secret the sacri-
fice of graduate life, for example. The sacrifice that
occurs, therefore, is the one that gets on with its
day with all of the violence that this entails, includ-
ing the violence against the sacred art of sacrifice
itself. A sacrifice, without words. A sacrifice I could
not perform today. A sacrifice, I ask, indeed beg, of
all anarchists who read this volume: learn the fine
art of pretending to be an anarchist. Hide this book.
Do not let the other anarchists read it.

254

toward an ethics

Conclusion

Georges Bataille aimed to describe the sacred
principles of the general economy. However, in the
preface to the first volume of The Accursed Share,
he admitted that his work always failed at this task.
To the extent that his work articulated the sacred
it did so only through betrayed ‘approximations’
(Noys, 2000: 117). In this sense, Bataille was writ-
ing through the Lacanian ‘analyst’s discourse’: his
discourse “trace[d] a contour around that which it
hovers about, circles, and skirts” (Fink, 1997: 28).
More than anything else, Bataille’s writing approxi-
mated silence. In his essay “The Method of Medi-
tation” (a chapter from The Unfinished System of
Non-Knowledge, 2001), he described silence as
the practice of sovereignty: “The sovereign is in the
domain of silence, and if we talk about it we in-
criminate the silence that constitutes it. [...] We can
certainly execute the study, but only in the worst,
the most painful conditions” (Bataille, 2001: 126).
It has been under this painful condition that I have
executed my study of the intersections of three
philosophical traditions.

I have attempted to satisfy two mutually exclu-
sive demands that have been imposed upon me from
opposite locations: the demand to construct a sys-
tem of knowledge about Bataille from the position of

255

the academy (the discourse of the university) and the
demand to sabotage this system of knowledge about
Bataille through the faithful reading of his work.
Moreover, in succumbing to the former demand I
have also failed in my sovereign task (the latter de-
mand): “Even, as far as talking about it, it is contra-
dictory to search for these movements [...] Insofar as
we seek something, whatever this might be, we do
not live sovereignly, we subordinate the present mo-
ment to a future moment, which will follow it” (ital-
ics in original; Bataille, 2001: 126).

I have thus come to acknowledge that there are
at least two ways in which failure ought to be under-
stood in relation to my essay. First, I have failed in
the putting-into -practice of Bataille’s ethics of fail-
ure. By constructing a system of knowledge for the
academy I have failed to perform the sovereign func-
tion of silence. Likewise, Bataille’s work “aimed at
the acquisition of a knowledge,” even where this
knowledge was discovered to be “that of an error”
(Bataille, 1991: 10-11). For my part, I have aimed
to demonstrate that a knowledge of the failed eth-
ics of anarchism can be elaborated in reference to
the failed knowledge of Bataille. Second, I have also
realized that the failure to perform failure, product-
ive as it may be, nonetheless necessitates future
reductions of useful knowledge. It therefore dawns
upon me that failure operates across two planes:

256

conclusion

the general and the restrictive economies. Bataille’s
reduction of the general economy to the restrictive
economy has proved essential to a full understand-
ing of the ethics of failure. Bataille had to fail so that
he could approximate the sacred relationship and to
promote movements toward sovereignty — Bataille
could not be silent. Similarly, post- anarchists had to
fail by producing a reductionist discourse in order to
demonstrate the problems of reductionism. We get
the sense that the first moment of failure is evident
in the following passage from the preface to the first
volume of The Accursed Share:

In other words, my work tended first of
all to increase the sum of human resour-
ces, but its findings showed me that this
accumulation was only a delay, a shrink-
ing back from the inevitable [...] Should I
say that under these conditions I some-
times could only respond to the truth of
my book and could not go on writing it?

[...] A book that [...] the author would
not have written if he had followed its
lesson to the letter [...] This invites dis-
trust at the outset (italics in original; Ba-
taille, 1991: 10-11).

However, there is a second moment in
Bataille’s thought that continued after the outset,

257

one that brings us to a fuller understanding of the
two economies:

This invites distrust at the outset and
yet, what if it were better not to meet
any expectation and to offer precisely
that which [...] people deliberately avoid
[...] It would serve no purpose to neglect
the rules of rigorous investigation, which
proceeds slowly and methodically (ital-
ics in original; Bataille, 1991: 11).

There is an initial failure that occurs when
the sovereign attempts to elucidate the principles
of the general economy through the restrictive
economy of the state-ment and there is the
secondary failure that occurs when the sovereign
employs the restrictive economy of the state-ment
in order to approximate the silence of the general
economy. In providing a knowledge of the elusive
truth inherent to the general economy Bataille also
temporarily betrayed it and this is an inexcusable
contradiction for many keen interpreters. But, as a
second moment of failure, Bataille argued that his
writing 'performed failure (“what if it were better not
to meet any expectation and to offer precisely what
which [...] people deliberately avoid [...] It would
serve no purpose to neglect the rules of rigorous
investigation”).

258

conclusion

According to Jeremy Biles, it is this latter per-
formance that evoked the sacred truth of Bataille’s
work (Biles, 2007: 27): that one fails in order to
succeed. There is thus a dualism implied in the en-
actment of sacrifice — Bataille performed the failure
while simultaneously exposing it and in doing so he
destroyed the coherence granted to the performance.
Biles continued, “the sacred at once fuses what the
profane had rendered distinct” (Biles, 2007: 28;
this is a point elaborated considerably by Hollier,
1990): “[Sjacrifice is the enactment of an attitude
of thought that is doomed to failure, dissatisfaction,
and imperfection” (Biles, 2007: 28). Or, as Michael
Richardson has put it: “In order to treat the sacred,
must we not by definition turn it into something that
is profane and, by doing so, does it not destroy the
very object it wants to study?” (Richardson, 1994:
48). To bring this to point, Lacan has suggested that
the symbolic order precludes the possibility of a re-
turn to the intimacy of the Real. This therefore raises
the following problematic: one can only perform ap-
proximations of the primordial failure without ever
accessing it. I began my essay by claiming that my
conceptual systems have already failed me, however
I shall now end with the proposition that my clas-
sification systems also intended to 'perform failure.

I have claimed that Georges Bataille’s ethical
philosophy converges in interesting ways with re-

259

cent readings of the anarchist tradition from the
standpoint of an emergent body of thought known
as post- anarchism. My first confession, that my
classification systems intended to perform a fail-
ure, consisted of the following objective: I aimed to
defy the contemporary codes of what it means to be
an anarchist in the academy. I shall now end with
a final confession: over the course of almost two
decades of higher education I have learned that to
be an anarchist in the academy is to consequently
occupy a liminal zone between two (admittedly un-
stable) identities. On the one hand, as an anarchist
one’s obj e ct of investi gati on i s imme di ately rej e cte d
by academics as naive and contradictory; to be an
anarchist in the academy is to have one’s research
mocked — it means avoiding social encounters with
other academics for fear of constant humiliation.
On the other hand, as an academic one is immedi-
ately dismissed by anarchists for ostensibly speak-
ing the “discourse of the university”; to be an aca-
demic within the anarchist milieu is to have one’s
research mocked as well — it means being excluded
from social encounters with other anarchists for
fear of having their radical epistemologies recuper-
ated by academic systems of knowledge.

To be sure, there are also advantages to this in-
sider-outsider position. Patricia Hill Collins ar-gued
that black feminists in the university often occupy

260

conclusion

a strange insider- outsider relation to the academic
community and the black community (cf., Col-
lins, 2000), as if tom between two epistemologies.
But, according to Collins, this position allows one
to remain distrustful of both identities and to put
them both into question — it allows a unique van-
tage point from which to critically evaluate aspects
of both communities. It has been my expressed
purpose to question both of my identities (as an
anarchist and as an academic) from another stand-
point. This standpoint remains not in-between
but unsettled, unsure, and perpetually suspicious
of both identities (without, necessarily, remaining
neutral). In this respect my thesis has been an at-
tempt to come to terms with my own position in be-
tween two worlds and to problematize the manifest
ethical discourses of both in order to arrive at some-
thing new. What I have discovered is only ‘new’ in
the sense that it is the object of multiple traditions
that has hitherto been repressed. I have discovered
a meta-ethics that opens up the discursive system
of traditional anarchism rather than pinning it down
to any meta-ethical discourse (resistance to clos-
ure). By way of concluding this essay, I shall now
describe what brought me to this position. It is only
by going to the end that we truly mark a beginning:

I began with the argument that post-anarchism
and traditional anarchism ought to be considered a

261

part of the same tradition, linked by a shared latent
ethical imperative. The move toward post-anarch-
ism has highlighted the ethical preoccupation of
traditional anarchist philosophy. Post- anarchism
is therefore a meta-ethical discourse on traditional
anarchism. I argued that contemporary meta-ethical
discourse has elaborated nihilist responses to meta-
ethical questions. The method of the meta-ethical
nihilists has been to hold all positive responses to
place and process under contempt. However, vari-
ous nihilist meta-ethical discourses have held either
place or process under more suspicion. It is for this
reason that I defined two nihilist discourses in re-
lation to contemporary anarchism: first, ethical
skeptics suspect positive responses to the question
of process but they do not reject the subject as the
locus of ethical activity, and; second, deep nihilists
reject the political category subject entirely. The
former classification has contributed to base sub-
jectivist possibilities and the latter classification has
contributed to base materialist possibilities.

I focused specifically on post-anarchist meta-
ethics and found that it largely adopted the base
subjectivist response to the questions of place and
process. I have argued that this perspective may be
limited in that the discourse aimed squarely to prob-
lematize the essentialism of traditional anarchism
without giving equal attention to the problematiza-

262

conclusion

tion of foundationalism. To the extent that essen-
tialism responds positively to the question of place,
foundationalism is the positive answer to the ques-
tion of process. Many post- anarchists have adopted
relativist epistemologies — whereby a multiplicity of
truth-claims has been preferred to universal truth-
claims — and pluralist political positions. I have
argued that there is a false choice between relativism
and universalism and that the ‘third way’ — evident
in the latent tradition that links post- anarchism to
traditional anarchism — is a rejection of all truth-
claims in favour of uncertainty. I also argued that the
anarchists insistence that their tradition’s c factor is
‘ethics’ comes as a bit of a surprise — to the extent
that it has been ethical it has also consistently failed
to codify positive ethical prescriptions. Paradoxically,
it is precisely this failure to consistently elucidate an
ethics that has been the ethical move par excellence.

I brought post-anarchist discourse into a re-
lationship with the philosophy of Georges Bataille.
To the extent that post- anarchism problematizes
traditional anarchist philosophy, Georges Bataille’s
philosophy may be used to problematize post-an-
archist philosophy and to offer yet another point
of departure: an anti- ess entialist and anti-founda-
tionalist philosophy that I have classified as nihilist
anarchism. The nihilist anarchist, like Nietzsche’s
passive nihilist, demonstrates “strength” in that her

263

“previous goals (‘convictions,’ articles of faith) have
become incommensurate (for a faith generally ex-
presses [...] submission to [...] authority)” (Nietz-
sche, 1968: 17-18). Where once constraint was
thought to be exercised by the state, the contem-
porary anarchist finds this power to be manifested
in a whole range of places, reducible only to the
subject of the state-ment. But Nietzsche also de-
scribed an “active nihilism” and this problematizes
the “lack of strength” that nihilist anarchists may
feel toward “oneself, [and] productively [toward] a
goal, a why, a faith” (Nietzsche, 1968: 18). Con-
sequently, the active nihilist creates her own values
in life and leaves them uncoded — her ethical act is
performed in silence. Similarly, Bataille’s ethical act
is the one that does not get recuperated by meta-
ethical discourse. My conclusion is that nihilist an-
archism, as the tradition that lurks always beneath
anarchism, maintains that all ethical acts are the
ones that do not get reified by language — precisely,
this is its meta-ethics.

264

conclusion

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The accursed share is the non-recuperable
portion that exists outside of every economy,
its promise is the immediate and eventual
destruction of any system or foundation
that appears to contain it. It is the anarchist
current that has always existed with or
without human intervention, with or without
the subject as the locus of ethical agency.

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